To:
From:
Philip Fournier
Date:
Tuesday, August 16, 2005
Subject: WR6: Students helping
students through effective workgroups
Ken Blanchard’s book, The One minute Manager Builds
High Performing Teams, builds on the concepts taught in the first book we read,
regarding the need for situation leadership.
In this case the situation leadership concept is applied to working in
teams. Ken teaches that teams go through
four natural stages and in each stage, a management style is appropriate to the
developmental level of the team. The
stages and the corresponding management styles are as follows:
TDS1, Orientation: The team is enthusiastic, but
lacks both experience and direction.
Management style must be structuring, with high direction and low
support as the team does not have the experience or clearly defined objectives
to work independently.
TDS2, Dissatisfaction: The team has realized the
difficulty of its task and of the differences between the team members. Some progress has been made but morale is low
due to the differences of opinion on how to solve problems. Management style must be highly directive and
also highly supportive to combat the low morale.
TDS3, Integrating: The team has made progress
beyond the dissatisfaction stage to beginning to work together
effectively. There are still some
disagreements, but the team has learned to work through them and the leadership
can back off to a collaborating level, offering high support but little
direction as the team can usually find its own way.
TDS4, Production: This team has arrived to a point
of smooth and effective operation with no need either for high support or high
direction. Leadership at this point is
validating with low direction and low support.
The book is good in its context. I have never
worked for a company large enough to do things in groups, so I don’t have a lot
of experience from that standpoint, but I do volunteer for my trade association
and have been on the government relations committee for about six years.
We have an acronym for TEAM; Together Everyone Accomplishes More.
Generally it is a true statement, and Blanchard’s levels of team development
are somewhat applicable to what I have observed over the years, though our team
rarely gets to concentrate on a single project for long enough to move beyond
level 2 (dissatisfaction; we have a fair bit of trouble reaching consensus and
leadership changes too often).
When it comes to education, in my limited
experience teams are generally despised by high-performing students. This
is what I have observed through the eyes of my very smart daughter and her
friends, all of them honor students: High performing students are
typically mixed in with low-performers on some kind of a research project. I
would suppose the instructor’s thought is that a synergy will be developed and
in the context of a group, learning will be enhanced. Instead, what
typically happens is the low-performer is only interested in doing the
low-performer’s typical level of effort. The high-performer knows this,
and also knows they have no authority to demand anything more from the
low-performer. So, the high-performer, not wanting to accept a mediocre
grade, ends up doing double duty, figuring that the low-performer is not going
to do work to their desired level. Naturally this results in resentment
on the part of the high-performer. The low-performer is somewhat
satisfied since they get the better grade, without having to exert any more
than their usual level of mediocre effort.
I use teams in the lab during teaching. This
is a result of necessity. I don’t have enough equipment or vehicles to go
around so I put between three and four people to a team. It is also
necessary because, even with five or six teams the instructor is run ragged
trying to help everybody. On the occasion that I have one student who is
advanced as compared to the rest, I will use him as a lab assistant to lower my
work load. But these teams never have the chance to develop into anything
that would resemble Blanchard’s teams. First, because these lab projects
are generally one or two nights, there is no continuity of time or experience
working together. Second, I figured it was a good idea to keep teams
revolving in case there was a few unwilling participants. So, I would
remake the teams every single time. I’m not sure that was a good idea,
but that is the way I did it and until now had not considered trying something
else. Because these teams were so short lived, I generally did not look
for any particular leadership qualities among the four people on the team.
More often than not, if one of the team members had supplied the vehicle
(a common occurrence), that person became the team leader so as to protect his
vehicle from damage.
In the future, I’d like to try something different,
in view of what I have read. Each class
is different of course, but if I can put together a set of team leaders with a
little more ability than the others, I can set up some teams that would work
together throughout the semester. This
might give me a chance to develop the teams at least to the level of
integrating. The trouble I see is that
a teacher cannot afford the dissatisfaction period. There simply is not time to risk
dissatisfaction inside of the time frame of a semester. My job is to teach automotive and I have a
responsibility to insure that each student has the best chance I can give him
to complete the lab assignments. But it
may be worth the effort to see if the teams can be more productive. I have always taken a highly directive
leadership position in the labs. The
students are given very little latitude to take their own direction. I have contented myself with TDS1, but
possibly I should take the pains to see if it would be worthwhile to the
students to move beyond that level.