Assignment-1 Vaishnavi Annavarjula 931111-6587 Email:
[email protected]
Abstract—The role of leadership and motivation has become significantly prominent as organizations have started recognizing the importance of offering the right guidance to build up projects has been a positive factor. The biggest challenge today is to discern the needs of the members and the right motivating factor which will cause them work towards a achieving their potential. The following essay is a study of the importance of using leadership strategies in choosing the correct team members for a project and how to keep them motivated in order to obtain optimum results.
I. I NTRODUCTION There is a popular saying that goes, united we stand, divided we fall. This is becoming highly relevant in the recent times as more people recognize the importance of team work to achieve better results. So much so that companies have whole departments dedicated to training and developing better work relationships within the organization to facilitate team work. The key to any great organization’s success is it’s ability to balance roles and distribute the tasks to the best suited person. In any team, there are nine key personality types that will allow the team to flourish [1]. Selecting people is an undoubtedly important step, but keeping the members motivated to perform to their potential and help in the growth of the team while the team helps facilitate individual growth as well. It is important for a team to have a true leader and be lead in the correct approach fit for a high performance team rather. The assignment requires the author to assume the role of a project manager and select eight different people for a innovative software development project. In this essay, it is assumed that the characteristics of each person we can choose from is similar to their stereotypes in the world, eg, the recent graduates will have an eager to please attitude. A team is a group of individuals who each have specific skills that are required in order to achieve a common goal. Not all humans are the same, they are different by their behaviour, motivations, and willingness to work.A team with individuals of common skills and different goals is very rarely optimal. The challenge lies in picking these unique individuals. The main literature in this essay is based on Belbin’s nine team roles[1]. The theory goes that there are nine different types of team members, and each team member has some exceptional qualities and some allowable faults. This is the guiding principle in this essay to select team members. The nine required roles in a team are [1][2]: 1. The plant: An imaginative and out of the box individual
who may also be slightly ignorant to the surroundings. 2.Resource Investigator: Enthusiastic and extroverted, liable to lose interest after initial excitement. 3.Coordinator: Can delegate and promote decision making among team members, has potential to be seen as manipulative. 4.Shaper: Is capable of taking bold decisions and inspiring others, provocative. 5.Moniter Evaluator: Fair judge of opinions, can find faults, possibly too critical and may not inspire action from team mates. 6.Team worker: Easy going, subverts conflict, too dependent on other’s decisions. 7.Implementer: Is a person of action, knows what tasks are to be done, is systematic but might be viewed as an unbending character. 8:Completer: Concentrates on finding errors, and gives a final finish to projects, may be prone to worrying too much. 9.Specialist: Highly committed to the cause, proactive, but has a narrow perspective. A dream team can be built with members ideally having these traits, and this essay aims at building and motivating a team that has these special skills The essay is divided into seven main sections, the introduction gives an overview of the rest of the essay, the second section talks about the choice of members, the third section discusses the motivation for choosing the team , the fourth section discusses how the project manager leads the team, the fifth section is a discussion about the importance of motivation in a team, the sixth section elaborates on the activities that bring a team together and the seventh section offers conclusions. II. C HOOSING THE T EAM A team in an organization should run like a well oiled machine, the most important step in any team activity is creating the team.The factors that play a important role in how a team works are cultural differences, employee egos and willingness to work together. The project manager has to select the right people with the right skills and attitude. The manager has two options while selecting members, either they can look within the available talent or they can recruit members, this recruitment has to be done in such a way that it doesn’t exceed alloted budget to bring members on board. While choosing from within the pool, the project manager will have to perform many negotiations to find the right people and get them on board whilst managing their
schedules [3]. In case the team needs outsider support, similar talks will be held with required specialists to get them on board, if the manager thinks a new person would be beneficial to the whole organization,they may hire a new employee. But the process is cumbersome as it involves giving specifc training to the new recruit [3]. By the given information regarding this assignment,this project could select all it’s eight members from an existing fifteen employees of which thirteen are full time and two can work only part time, or outsiders can be recruited based on requirement. As the project manager, I consider the given employees and their history of working in collaboration with each other and arrive at the following team, the motivation for selection is given in the subsequent section. One highly experienced part time developer, two newly hired graduates, four developers who have prior experience of whom at least three have collaborated before and one developer who has an experience of working in a team, but not much with regard to the project. These people are chosen as they fit into Belbin’s required team roles because of their skills and possible personality types. The highly experienced person can assume the role of the specialist. One of the new graduate will be a resource investigator due to their eagerness to fit in and learn and the other will be an implementer. The person with no experience in this field but has worked in a team before is the team player who can respect other people’s skills and judgment while holding the team together. Of the four people with required experience and the team history, the one who is new to this team will be the evaluator as they won’t allow any personal ties to with-hold their judgments, and the other three will become the plant, shaper and completer given their prior experience [1]. It is up to the manager to lead the team into assuming these roles through motivation.
The reason for selecting the people that have requried experience and have collaborated before is that they can smooth over the rough areas that the new hires may have and as they know how the other person works, they can work on in this project as well [6]. A person who may not be experinced enough in the technical skill but is a known team player implies that they can work with the others putting aside any personal issues towards a common goal while picking up the essential skill and giving new perspective [6]. These people along with the project manager with their ideal skills can build themselves up to fit into Belbin’s nine roles as required. IV. L EADERSHIP A PPROACH It is not enough that a team is put together using all the resources, it is essential that an able leader lead this team to fulfilling the organizational goal and allow the individual members to succeed in achieving their own goals. This section discusses how important the right leader is to the team. Leadership is not about following a set of rules written in stone, it is dynamic and it is not the same for all teams. Leadership is a highly situational science [4]. As this team has a diverse group of people with varied experience and expertise, the leader of this project must be able to a handle situations as delicately or firmly as needed. While the more experienced people may be able to work on their own, the new recruits may need someone to show them the ropes. A leader must be able to inculcate the team with the required cultural values and the importance of understanding of the exiting cultural differences [7]. This is important as this shows leader as a more approachable and broad minded person in whom the team can trust rather than someone to report to at the end of the day. As this is a high performance team with the members settling into various roles by themselves, it is important that the leader take on the role of the coordinator.
III. M OTIVATION FOR C HOOSING THE T EAM Although selecting a team based purely on technical skill is possible, it isn’t feasible as members of a team are real people with their own personal goals and intentions for working [4]. While selecting the team, much consideration should be put into these factors as well as technical skills.The following paragraphs explain why ideally these people have been selected into the team. The main motive for selecting the new graduates is the assumption that they follow an ideal curriculum, these people have a healthy mix of soft skills with technical skills,they will need to be trained in the area of working in high performance teams but they can pick up these skills quite fast [5]. Experience is the best teacher is the primary principle while selecting a highly experienced developer even though they are only available part time. They will bring their wisdom rather than their in site work into the project.
V. M OTIVATING THE T EAM A team needs motivation in order to work well, more often than not, while money is a good incentive it is not the only or most important incentive. People need autonomy and their contribution to be recognized [4]. The task of the leader is to offer the right motivation to the right people in such a way that they fulfil their roles thereby assisting their own growth. Motivation comes in many ways like threats of termination, annual bonus, the need to prove something etc. A good leader is someone who can find the balance between the threats and appreciation, threats indicate a firm hand of control, the leader should be able to know when to control an when to allow autonomy [4]. In this case, as a project manager I would lead the team with a firm hand initially until everything falls into place after
which the members will have a degree of freedom to do their tasks using their discretion. I would set aside some time every week for the members to do whatever they want to do as long as it is useful to the organization in order to exercise their creativity and autonomy.
[5] J. Downey, M. McMurtrey and S. Zeltmann, ’Mapping the MIS Curriculum Based on Critical Skills of New Graduates: An Empirical Examination of IT Professionals’, Journal of Information Systems Education, vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 351-363, 2008.
VI. T EAM B UILDING
[7] B. Belkhouche, K. Hamdan and P. Smith, ’The Influence of Leadership and Work Culture on Software Cost Effort’, JSW, vol. 8, no. 6, 2013.
Team building is an important activity that allows the members of a team to improve their communication and unity as a group in a casual, yet official atmosphere [8]. The reason team building is important is because all the team members come from different backgrounds with totally different goals, for instance, the graduate might want this project to be a diving board into their future where as the senior developer is just looking to use this as an other flagship project to their name. The task of the manager is to bring these diverse groups together. Team building exercises are usually extra curricular activities that allow people to have fun while coming up with creative solutions. Team building activities allow members to fulfill similar duties as they have in a formal setting without the pressure of performing [8]. As the team manager, I would ask the team members to perform the tried and tested tasks in team building such as building a tower out of unorthodox ingredients, and planning a day out where the members can relax and be themselves. VII. C ONCLUSION The society is made up of individuals who complement each other and it is the role of managers and the leaders to bring them together and enable them to grow to their full potential while doing the community a lot of good, there by achieving common and individual goals and hence satisfying their need to be useful to the society or organization and at the same time have individual achievements. The essay is a study in teams, some of the conclusions gathered are, it is very important to motivate people to function as a group. Individual assignments are easier to achieve than group work due to some hesitation regarding teams and people’s ability to adjust and adapt in a team. The leader has to be capable of putting this hesitation to rest and paving the path towards more harmony in team work. R EFERENCES [1] M. Belbin, Management teams. London: Heinemann, 1989. [2] G. Smith, ’Making the team [project team building and leadership]’, IEE Review, vol. 47, no. 5, pp. 33-36, 2001. [3] A Guide To The Project Management Body Of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide). Newtown Square, Pa. : Project Management Institute, Inc., 2004. Print. [4] P. Hersey, K. Blanchard and D. Johnson, Management of organizational behaviour. London: Prentice Hall, 2001.
[6] R. Huckman, B. Staats and D. Upton, ’Team Familiarity, Role Experience, and Performance: Evidence from Indian Software Services’, Management Science, vol. 55, no. 1, pp. 85-100, 2009.
[8] S. Medinschi and Suzana Adela Colba,’The Importance of Team Building for the Success of a Project.’
