Wednesday, April 23, 2008
In my previous post, I did mentioned about the three main issues to team building: team identity, solidarity and commitment. Today, I shall blog on solidarity and commitment. Solidarity in laymen terms is called cohesion and loyalty. Without cohesion and loyalty, the team could not exercise synergy meaning working together to give a bigger output as compared to the total output should the people working separately. The lack of solidarity also means that people will not be as heavily involved and committed to their work. Therefore, it is essential that the team leader should seek revenues to build up team solidarity through the following steps:1. Expressing solidarity.
2. Encouraging interpersonal relationships although the purpose is to ensure work gets done.
3. Dealing with conflict through open discussions.
4. Controlling competition to prevent bianess.
5. Encouraging some competition.
Most often, getting people to be fully committed in their work is the most difficult process. It involves a range of leaders activity (setting clear objectives, allowing active participation, giving feedback, formal and informal communication , offering positive reinforcement and the championing the success of the team.) that are either very time consuming or difficult to implement. In the case of giving feedback could sometimes hurt someone so emotionally that even a grown up man could cry for hours before bucking up and move on. If the team leader do not communicate well with the team workers, it may lead to unwanted office politics, suspicions or even speculations of lay offs. Therefore, it is crucial of the team leader to step up and carry out the range of leaders activity. (setting clear objectives, allowing active participation, giving feedback, formal and informal communication , offering positive reinforcement and the championing the success of the team.)
However, being too cohesive can be a problem. This may run the risk of group think which result in making irresponsible decisions and conflict with other groups in the organisations. Group think is a dangerous problem because the group may be too complacent and deter constructive changes to their teams which is detrimental. A team should always constantly seek outside idea and feedback, welcome self-criticism and disagreement to improve themselves which can then benefit others. One of the classic example is Mas Selamat incident whereby the 'guards' are too complacent about his job and this result into many recalls, activations of ops team and many OTs to find Mas Selamat. Such actions are irresponsible and should be severely dealt with. Because of this, several man power, resources were wasted and still, Mas Selamat is still at large which is dangerous to Singapore's security.
There should also be quantitative and qualitative assessment on team effectiveness and introduction of rewards to the effective teams. This could be done through profit sharing, gainsharing schemes and employee share option.
I was really tired today. I drooled on my bus trip to the train station (saliva dripping on my pants). I also had many occassions of weakening knees during my train trips to night classes because I was really tired and dozed off while doing nothing. I still do not like my organisation and I still have the perspectives of the organisation from the very first impression.
Labels: accountancy, accountant in business, accounting, business accounting
what we could have been, 11:18 PM.
