How our Team was formed

How Our Team was formed

Our teams were chosen by our form tutor Desmond. At random he put us into groups. The members of my team are Ibrahim, Rae and Leon. I felt that I am part of a good team because I am familiar with my group members and I know they are known to be hard working.

Can you describe different types of team and the benefits of a team for an organisation?

In every team there is a leader; the rest of the members in a group will take on different roles in order to achieve a set goal. In our group we elected Ibrahim to become leader because he is well spoken. Having a group of 5 to work in is very helpful because we can delegate roles to the group members and as a whole getting work done more quickly rather than if it was just one or two people working. However having a group of 5, can sometimes mean that there might be conflict when trying to make a decision that will affect the whole group; a majority has to be met in our group before we try to make any decision – because it’s only fair. This is similar to a political party. An example will be the Conservative party. Currently the leader of the party is David Cameron. In a general election when the public votes on what political party they want to be the government for the next 4/5 years. The leader of the winning political party becomes the Prime Minster for that term. Every party has MP’s (Members of Parliament) who work in specific areas in the government. A few examples are health, education and welfare. These people are members of the cabinet. This is most important areas of the government and work together with the Prime Minster to bring in laws and have them legislated. A reason why MPs have these delegated roles is because the Prime Minster would be too busy to handle issues that affect the UK all to himself. Prime Minster has duties of looking after his/her constituency, media/press conferences, appointing government and looking after family at 10 Downing Street. Ultimately many responsibilities, so he is helped out by the senior MPs also known as cabinet. This is similar to the way how our group works because we have given ourselves tasks to carry out, which will work individually but a long term goal to complete the project. In a different type of team, for example just 1 person, it would be very difficult for them to come up with many ideas as our group did. When they do come up with an idea, they don’t have anybody else to liaise with. So the idea they come up with may not be as strong because positives and negatives haven’t really been taken to account. Working alone means that one person has to take control of everything. This includes admin duties, finance, budget, marketing, research and many more. Having all these responsibilities is a reason why some self-employed people aren’t doing so well, if they had a team behind them it would be more likely that they would be doing better and the workload isn’t on one person’s shoulders.

Can you explain how to build cohesive teams that perform well?

·         You will need to create goals/targets that all team members are able to work too and can achieve. By doing this, ensures that everybody is working towards the same ultimate goal.

·         Dr Meredith Belbin’s theory suggests that peoples personalities in a group make them take roles automatically and they aren’t chosen. This theory supports cohesive team because if everybody in a group project takes a role that suits them and not a role that is forced upon them. The group in theory should work well because they are doing something they like doing, and is best suited for them based on their personality.

·         Communicating effectively in a team is good to build cohesion because if there is little communication or poor communication. It shows that the team isn’t considering the opinion of every member in the group. Giving feedback and opinions on what happens in a team will ensure that everybody in the groups voice gets heard and best decisions will be made because decision will be made upon different points of view; Not just one.

·         If you are in a position in which you can decide which team you are in. try to have people with different skills to you, so that there is a diversity of skills in the group. This helps cohesion because you can delegate different tasks to different people who would be more experience in a field that you aren’t familiar with. An example is football teams; they don’t have 11 goal keepers to stop the other team or winning. They have midfielders, strikers and defenders to win the football match. In this example you can clearly see the delegation of roles in order to complete the joint goal which is to win.

·         In our group we performed well because I have very good IT skills and I was able to teach the other members in my group who weren’t as good how to create a blog – which we used for evidence. Rae worked very well with Leon by handling the agendas and minutes for us. As a group we took turn in who was the secretary and chair of meeting; as it is only fair. Ibrahim constantly kept bringing new ideas to the table – he went out of his way to create a business logo for our group. we all kept in contact by sharing phone numbers and created a group chat on what’s app – ensuring that we was constantly updated with each other’s’ progress. Email is good but we decided by having numbers and messaging is more effective because we each use our phones a lot. Bringing in the different skills/qualities and combining them together builds a strong cohesive team like our group for the project work.