Leadership: Building Highly Effective Teams How to Transform Teams into Exceptionally Cohesive Professional Networks - a practical guide (Project Management)(The Leadership Series) by Michael Nir

Author:Michael Nir [Nir, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

Case study example #1

When Mark took over as the Mobile Software Development team leader, he was faced with a challenge. He had been given a team which was scattered across three countries and was as fragmented as it could be. The core team at the company headquarters in Silicon Valley was well integrated, but they had to work together with team members who were in Poland and South Korea. This created huge challenges. Not that there was anything wrong with individual team member’s skills and proficiency, rather communication between the core group and the extended team members was iffy, at best.

This was Mark’s first time as a team leader and he wanted to do it right. Somehow, he had to turn his fragmented team into a high performance team; the only question was… How?

Before taking over the team, Mark had spent a week in an intensive team leader’s training seminar. He felt that he had a pretty good grasp on how to make a good team; he just wasn’t sure how to do it over such long distances, and with such diverse schedules. Somehow, he’d have to find a way to apply the principles that he had learned in that seminar to working with a virtual team, even though his team was scattered across thousands of miles and many time zones.

The first thing that Mark decided to do, in order to turn his team around was to improve communications. That was going to be enough of a challenge in and of itself; but if he couldn’t do that, then he wouldn’t be able to do anything else.

To get his team’s communication on track, Mark instituted mandatory team meetings. Since his team members were scattered, he used Skype for this. He felt that he needed to get everyone on the same sheet of music, and he also needed to get them to know one another. So, his meetings were a little bit different than the typical company meeting. Instead of spending all their time with boring status reports, he had everyone send their status report in, so that it could be compiled on a weekly basis and shot back out to all team members. Amanda, his team’s technical writer took care of that, even though it wasn’t really part of her job. She put together a standard format for everyone to use, so that all she had to do was compile it and e-mail it out. That gave Mark the ability to use his team meetings like he wanted to, for team building, rather than for status updates.

Mark’s team meetings became the most unusual ones in the company. Besides everyone giving a one-sentence summary of their day’s work, the rest of the time was spent on getting to know one another. Each day, one of the team members, chosen at random, talked about themselves. They gave a brief autobiography, which had to answer a list of ten questions that the team had put together.

Each meeting ended with somebody sharing a favorite quote.

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