Why Is It Important for a Company to Have a Mission?

Team Building 1

Team Building: Case One ElectriGov

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Why is it important for a company to have a mission?

Case One in “Team building: Proven strategies for improving team” by Dyer et al, detailed how three individually cohesive teams who were required to work together nearly caused a terrible accident (pages 177-179). Without an obvious mission being right placed immediately in front of their combined assignment the three competent teams became a dangerous force of competition and back biting. By the end of the scenario, the three teams agreed upon a goal which was somewhat of a “mission” statement for the group (avoiding accidents at all cost) which determined their approach to working together. Without this agreement/goal/mission, the three groups became highly competitive and less productive than they should have been when working on a large project together. They knew their job, but they did not know how to establish a similar direction or approach for accomplishing it. With a mission statement, all can agree on the direction and even outline the methods to be used for the process. If all the members of the team know why they do what they do in a mission statement, the road to success is a lot smoother.

Why is it important for team members to know their roles on a team?

Unless each role is spelled out clearly, members of teams might assume the duties of another worker. Or, some areas of a project might be overlooked. Both of these situations occurred in Case One: ElectriGov with undesirable results. Each of the three foremen had the same role when they worked on smaller projects, and when the large project came along, their roles were overlapped and each one found themselves in an unhealthy competition with the other two.

Secondly, the lack of definite roles for the crews led to the situation whereby someone could have been killed when “one crew failed to inform another crew that the wires were hot” (Dyer et al 2013, 178) which is a large example of not understanding what the role of the crew were (along with heavy competitive spirit).

Is Competition within a team a good or bad thing? Explain your response.

Competition is a good thing in many ways within a team. Rewards, challenges and good natured ribbing help to create cohesiveness among workers. But, there is a problem when competing prevents cooperating. As in many things, moderation and good taste are the keys.

Why is it important to set short- and long-term goals when planning a meeting regarding conflicts? Provide examples.

Breaking anything as complex as team building into smaller pieces such as short-term goals is important in helping the team to realize that small steps make big steps thus developing a problem solving process rather than being presented with a solution. Long-term goals are simply good for having a goal to aim at with the small steps. For example, in the case ElectriGov, the short term goals helped the members of the teams to separate the small problems by looking at and discussing the inner-workings of the other team’s approaches to the larger goal. In this way they were able to come up with a solution to approaching the long-term goal (completion of the project) by analyzing what should and what should not be done when intersecting the skills of three teams.

Why is it significant for leaders to understand how to resolve conflict and avoid unhealthy agreements?

The end result to any project is of course the completion. However, good leaders know that the mechanics of how that project gets completed is more important to the survival of their company. Unhealthy agreements are simply stop gaps in long term conflicts and it is wiser to resolve the conflict rather than put a band aid on them. Resentment comes from improper solutions to conflict.

References

Dyer, W. G., Jr., Dyer, J. H., & Dyer, W. G. (2013). Team building: Proven strategies for improving team performance (5th ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.