The Student's Guide to Successful Project Teams

William A Kahn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317824176
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

It is common for undergraduate and graduate students across various disciplines to be placed on teams and assigned group project research reports and presentations which require them to work together. For example a psychology course requires teams to develop, conduct, analyze and present the result of their experiments, a marketing course requires student project teams to prepare marketing plans and present their conclusions, and an organizational behavior course forms teams for the purpose of researching the cultures of different organizations and making presentations about their findings. This new guidebook will be a core text on how to help student project teams confront and successfully resolve issues, tasks and problems. Sections include conceptual material, stories and illustrations, and exercises. Students and teachers in Organizational Behavior, Management, Marketing and all psychology disciplines will find this book of interest.

Chapter 1

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Dimensions of the Student Project Team

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Congratulations. You've just joined a project team. It looks simple enough. You chose several classmates—or they were chosen for you—and have a certain amount of time during the semester to work on projects, complete them reasonably well, and give presentations or hand in reports that will result, sooner or later, in a course grade, one that you hope is pretty high. Yet, as students who have worked in such teams know, there is much that moves beneath the surface. These teams can get complicated. They have no formal structure. There is no hierarchy, no supervisory structure, and no clear delineation of roles and responsibilities. You have to figure out how to divide up work and then piece the different parts together such that it comes off as coherent and smart. You have to make decisions about the quality of the work. You have to work with people whose styles and efforts might be quite different than your own. You have to figure out ways to hold one another accountable, even though you have no real authority over one another. Beneath the surface, there is the world of negotiation and persuasion, shifting expectations, and difficult conversations had and avoided. Welcome to the project team trip.

These teams are thus wonderful opportunities for learning, not simply about course material but about the process by which high-functioning teams are created and maintained. Knowing how to make project teams work really well is a crucial skill. Much of what occurs in organizational life revolves around teams—people working together, within and across departments and functions, to do what they cannot do by themselves. Like student project teams, teams in organizations—whether they are temporary task forces, long-standing committees, or ongoing research and development teams—are responsible for developing and implementing ideas. People must know something about how to participate effectively, and have the skills necessary to make real contributions to teams of which they are members. Student project teams are the vehicles by which such knowledge and skills are acquired.

Too often, however, these teams break down, and students learn very little of use in terms of how to make truly successful teams work. Creating high-performing teams from a collection of individuals who vary widely in their motivations, capabilities, perspectives, and backgrounds is a complicated, difficult process. Teams break down in varying ways: Sharp disagreements about equity of participation and workload split members into warring factions; individuals are isolated and blamed; members settle for unsatisfactory results rather than discuss different expectations and provide feedback; struggles for control and leadership leave members arguing or simply withdrawing altogether; and members disengage, leaving one or two team members to do all the work. Too many students have had such experiences, and not surprisingly, they are not particularly eager for more project team experiences.

When teams break down or do not form properly to begin with, much gets lost: clear thinking about tasks and problems, the simple division of labor and integration of ideas, useful communication, the exploration of different perspectives that yield creative solutions, synthesis, and integration. Students turn away from one another. They turn away from the work of the team, and from the course material itself. When teams fail, the costs—to learning, to performance, and to students' course experiences—are quite high. Students lose out in several ways. First, they simply do not learn as much about course content. The theory of teams—any teams, whether in the classroom or the boardroom—is that people working together have better ideas, create better products, and implement better programs than any one person could by himself or herself. When project teams work badly, students simply do not learn as much or do as well as they otherwise might. Second, students lose out in terms of what they might learn about team process. Course instructors assign work to teams partly in the hopes that students might learn something about how to work well with others. When project teams break down irreparably, the learning suffers.

It does not have to be so. Your team does not have to be an awful experience. Prevention is possible, and so is intervention. This is partly a matter of knowledge. If you know something about the various phases and stages of project team development, the obstacles that you are sure to face, and ways in which you can overcome those obstacles, you are far more likely to avoid the pitfalls of project teams or to rescue your team if you happen to stumble. Knowledge helps normalize the project team experience. When you come up against difficult moments in your teams, you are more likely to handle those moments effectively if you realize that they are normal rather than abnormal, and simply need to be dealt with directly rather than avoided out of embarrassment and anxiety. You can then look clearly at your teams and, on the basis of knowing about the processes by which such teams get stuck and can get moving again, take useful action.

The aim of this book is to provide you with the kind of knowledge that can help you develop insights about how to make your teams more successful. Such knowledge comes in several forms. In this book I offer various concepts that make clear what happens in project teams throughout the various stages and phases of their development. I discuss the obstacles that, like hurdles, need to be cleared along the way, beginning with the formation of the team and ending with the termination of the team. I also describe exercises that help you surface, talk through, and overcome those obstacles. My aim is to offer various tools and strategies that, if used correctly, can create positive project team experiences in situations that might otherwise be painful and unsuccessful.

Throughout the book I describe several actual student project teams. We learn a great deal through the stories of others. We learn about the paths that different teams take and what happens to them along their journeys. We learn how team members think and feel. Mostly, we learn about the choices that they make, and how those choices influence their experiences and performances. You will be faced with many choices during the team experience. You will have to choose how much to engage in the team—how much effort to put into team projects and into building relationships with other team members. You will choose how open you are, in terms of saying what you really think and feel. You will choose how much to listen to or ignore other members' feedback, and how much to try and change how you act. You will choose how much you care about the quality and outcomes of the work itself, and how much you care about other members. You will choose what types of roles you play on your team, and how much those roles help or hinder that team.

You will make such choices, over and over during the life of the team, and not always be aware of doing so. These choices matter a lot, both for how much you learn and how well your teams perform. The success of student project teams is directly shaped by the choices that their members make about how they will be on their teams. This belief in the power of student choice serves as a foundation of this book. So, too, is the insistence that students are themselves each ultimately responsible for the nature of the teams that they create. Student project teams succeed and fail not because of the flexibility of the professor, or the clarity or difficulty of the assignment, or the extent to which team members are smart or nice. They succeed or fail as a result of the accumulated choices that each team member makes about the nature of his or her participation. Throughout this book I emphasize the range of such choices and their implications. Choices and consequences, followed by more choices and consequences—such is the way that our lives develop, and the nature of the teams we create.

Where Are You Going?

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Scenario 1

You are a member of a team that has a semester-long project. The project has several deliverables—two short papers and a final presentation. The team has five members, and you feel fortunate that two of your teammates are particularly smart in the subject and want to do really well in the course. The remaining members, including you, care as well and are no dummies, but it's clear that these other two are going to really push the team to do well. Indeed, that is exactly what happens. The two become the team leaders, although they are not always on the same page; they argue a great deal about what the team should do and how it should do its work. Getting the first paper done is stressful. The team is up late the night before the paper is due, making changes and arguing. One of the leaders finally tells the others to go home, and she finishes it by herself, staying up almost the whole night to do so. The paper receives the highest grade in the class. The process is repeated for the second paper, except for the fact that one team member does not contribute much. You work pretty hard on the paper, but are disappointed that much of what you did is tossed out by one of the leaders during the final revision. That paper also receives a high grade. By the time of the final presentation, the team has become several subgroups—the two leaders, who struggle for power; the other two members, who contribute little and miss meetings; and you, frustrated but trying to keep the team together. The process of putting together the presentation is pretty bad, with team members angry at one another. The two leaders argue with one another. One of them finally stalks away, so the remaining one takes control of the presentation and does most of it. The professor gives the presentation a high grade.

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Scenario 2

You feel lucky to be on a team with some of the people you really like in the class. The project is hard, with lots of different pieces that have to be done throughout the course, but working on it has as least been fun. Your meetings are not too long, thankfully, and most of the team ends up having dinner or going out for drinks afterwards. You are really glad that there are not a lot of strong personalities on the team. You've heard about the problems that other teams in the class are having, with people fighting with one another and trying to take control. You haven't experienced anything like that on your team. People are really nice to one another, and polite. They agree with one another a lot, and there is none of the conflict that you have seen on other teams. You and the others laugh a lot. The team does a pretty good job of figuring out what direction to take on the various assignments, and the leadership just seems to be naturally shared among most of the members, except for the shy person. You are thus a bit surprised when the first and second team assignments receive relatively low, below-average grades. The other members are frustrated as well. The team blames the professor for not being clear on the assignments, and for not having understood the ideas that the team had developed. You are not quite as sure—you wonder whether the team had really worked to come up with the best arguments and analysis. The team process continues to go really well as the end of the semester approaches and members begin to work on the final presentation. The team comes up with a good plan, members agree to it quickly, and they get their work done and submitted to the member who agreed to edit and give the presentation. The final grade is, again, disappointing.

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Scenario 3

You are on a project team whose members have agreed that it would be good to try things in which they are not expert to get better at them. The project involves many dimensions—PowerPoint slides, presentations, analyzing numbers, facilitating team meetings, managing the project, editing, and interviews. The team members decided at their initial meeting that this was a good chance to get some practice with some of these aspects, as they were about to graduate and wanted to improve. You are impressed with this attitude, because most of the other student project teams that you've been on focused much more on just getting the work done as fast as possible— which meant that people who could do certain things quickly did them, and others did not learn what they did not already know. You are not particularly good at PowerPoint, so you volunteer to put together the slides for the two presentations. Another team member who seems a bit shy agrees to facilitate meetings. Another member who professes to be pretty disorganized decides to try project management. The team starts off slowly. The facilitator cannot really control the meetings, which neither start nor end on time and are filled with lots of tangential conversations. The project manager is, indeed, rather disorganized, and seems unable to put together a simple flow chart that lays out roles, responsibilities, timelines, and the like. You struggle with the PowerPoint slides for the first presentation, staying up all night by yourself to get the slides done. You certainly feel like you learned the basics of the software, although you wished that it had not been so stressful. The grades for the first two presentations are about average for the class, and you and the others wished that they were higher, given all the work that you had put in.

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Which of the teams in these scenarios would you describe as successful? The first team gets high grades but team members have a pretty bad experience working together. The second team does poorly on its graded assignments but members like one another. The third team also does not perform as well as it would like but its members learn skills that they each needed to learn. So which is successful? The answer is important. It helps you decide where, exactly, you are going when you take a trip on a project team.

Students make different choices in answering this question. I suspect that members of the teams just described would describe their respective teams as more or less successful, according to different criteria.

Success Is Determined by Grades

Members of the first team might think they were successful because their team received high grades. Students often feel that the purpose of the team—the reason it exists—is to complete a course requirement, as determined by the professor, and that doing so well is a matter of receiving high grades. Indeed, performance in the context of an academic course is measured most clearly and simply by grades. To the extent that students believe that grades are the ultimate measure of success, they are often willing (presumably within the boundaries of ethical behavior) to have the ends justify the means by which the team worked to achieve those ends. The students in the first scenario that I described might well say that they were quite successful, indeed, the best in the class...