Team Building and Problem Solving

Through the years I’ve learned about working in teams the hard way. I’ve been on teams where nothing got done because there weren’t any action steps to follow. I’ve been on teams so disorganized that no one was really sure what we were supposed to be doing. I’ve been on teams where one person made all the decisions. If you’ve had experience working on teams you probably can relate. If only I had learned then what I am learning now in my Team Building and Problem Solving class, some of those team experiences could have been salvaged.

I am enjoying this class much more than I thought I would. I thought that’d we’d be put into teams on the first day and set off to do a project, but that’s not how this class has started. We do a wide variety of activities in class, so it’s never a three-hour lecture. We’ve watched videos, had discussions, and worked in small teams to do some troubleshooting scenarios. We also do a lot of icebreakers, which sometimes include getting up and moving around.

In our last class session, we talked about what it means to be a leader on a team. You’re responsible for more than just keeping the team on task. You’re also in charge of keeping every team member engaged. You can do this through eye contact and giving everyone a chance to speak within a certain time frame.

Later on we discussed a few problems that occur often on teams including cliques forming within a group, someone dominating the discussions, someone making and acting on decisions that the group didn’t vote on. Much of these issues can be reduced or eradicated by setting ground rules. Most of the teams I’ve been on didn’t have ground rules. I wonder now how that would have changed the experiences that I’ve had.