A Teams Success

In the article by Bolman and Deal it talked greatly about the important aspects that make teams succeed and work well together. My personal experience with a semi-successful team has to do with my synchronized skating team. I will go through the what works well in our teams’ structure and what doesn’t work as well.

One quote that really spoke to me was that in the seal teams if one individual makes any infractions the whole team gets punished. In a sense my synchro team has this sort of mindset since if one person isn’t synchronized with everyone else, we will lose points during competitions which would punish everyone since we all get the same score and we either win together or lose together. This incentivizes everyone to work hard to get better at staying in sync and to skate more gracefully so that we don’t let each other down.

In the reading it talked about how well organized small groups have the ability to produce results that often elude the grasp of large organizations and it also talked about how smaller groups will have an easier time to work well together since they are more likely to listen to individual thoughts to help make the group work better together. This relates to my synchro team since we only have 10 people right now when usually teams have 16 people. Everyone knows everyone else so we don’t have to be afraid of speaking out during practices but since we are close to each other we also don’t want to hurt each other’s feelings which leads to inefficient practices where people know someone is struggling to keep up but are too afraid to hurt their feelings by telling them what they are doing wrong. Instead they just hope that our coach will tell the individual skater. Ideally the skater will recognize where they are struggling so that they can practice on their own but sometimes the individual might not even know.

Our team’s structure is a simple hierarchy. We technically have 3 coaches, 1 head coach that we have only practiced with for one week and 2 side coaches that relay the head coaches’ thoughts to us. Although only 1 of the side coaches is with us every practice while the other is mostly busy this semester. If we want to get feedback from the head coach we have to take a video of our practices and send the video to the head coach which isn’t really efficient since we would like to have the feedback straight away but we have to wait days or even weeks to get the feedback. We don’t get to see our head coach since he lives in England and its expensive to get him to come to our practices.

Some important questions that the reading discussed that was important when discussing what makes successful teamwork were:

What is our mission?

Our mission is to ideally win our competitions by skating in unison in our programs.

What Actions are required?

We practice 2 times a week on ice for 4 hours In total and we have 2 off ice practice sessions where we practice teamwork and strength training.

Who should do what?

We all need to work together to skate together and to be synchronized with each other and we need to make sure we match our footwork together and our speeds. Our coaches need to make sure our program matches the song and to make changes where need to best use everyone’s abilities.

How should we make decisions?

Most decisions will be made by our side coach that is at our practice, but she will discuss major changes to our program with the other two coaches since those 3 coaches will be making the final decisions on what will happen. We, skaters, can make recommendations on what we could either change or improve on.

How do we coordinate efforts?

            We coordinate efforts by going to practice every day and if people miss practices, they have to pay a fine which should disincentivize people from slacking. We are also required to practice by ourselves for an hour once a week and seeing other people on the team at the practice times will incentive us to work harder to improve.

What do individual members care about most: time, quality, participation?

We as individuals should be focusing on quality since we need to be in sync to get the most amount of points. Time is a bit of an issue since we only have a few more months before our first competitions and we have a lot of stuff to work on. No one should be caring about participation since there are no participation points in competitions.

What are the special skills and talents of each group member?

We all have special skills we can do better than others and we have utilized them in our moves in the field element where different pairs are doing different moves that they specialize in to, like for example I am doing spread eagles which is a skating move that I do very well.

How will we determine success?

             We will determine success on the amount of enjoyment we get from skating well together and if we place well in competitions.

            I feel like our team isn’t perfect, but we are working hard to get better. We have been doing team building meetings that have been helping everyone get more comfortable around each other and to learn each other’s personalities and strengths so that we can understand how to work well together.

Katzenbach and Smith have 6 distinguishing features of high-quality teams.

High-performing teams shape purpose in response to a demand or an opportunity placed in their path, usually by higher management.

            I would say that our team meets these criteria since we have our coaches that tell us what we need to do and improve on and what our program is. The coaches also allow our own thoughts to be added to the program as long as it works well, like for example we choose where we place our hands during the program and people gave out their own suggestions.

High-performing teams translate common purpose into specific, measurable performance goals.

We have many different goals that we are trying to meet like we have split our program into multiple different parts and we work on each part one at a time to try our best to perfect it and we also have overall goals like, staying in sync and to get better and doing our moves.

High-performing teams are of manageable size.

We are 10 people plus 3 coaches so 13 in total which is a very manageable size.

High-performing teams develop the right mix of expertise.

We have 3 coaches with many different background of skating like our head coach has been teaching synchro for years and used to do pair skating which he has included into our program and one of our side coaches used to be on a college synchro team so she knows the ins and outs of synchronized skating and the third coach used to be the teams synchro coach a few years back.

High-performing teams develop a common commitment to working relationships.

We have our weekly schedule of when we practice, and we all are required to practice by ourselves 1 hour a week which if we skip, we are fined. We all know our own individual goals that we need to improve on and to not let each other down we work hard to achieve them.

Members of high-performing teams hold themselves collectively accountable.

The 6^th characteristic kind of ties into the above characteristic since we are all help collectively accountable through being punished as a team if one person fails and through punishing the individual if they aren’t working hard enough through fines.

Being a good teammate doesn’t just mean being nice to each other, but it also means helping each other our when people need help and to help suggest ways that we can improve, to each other. There is that saying that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link so being a good teammate means recognizing that weakest link and working hard with them to make them stronger. Having a good team relationship would encourage these behaviors since we wouldn’t want each other to look bad in front of others.