A team is a form of group, the members of which work together, and that is often applied by companies, colleges, and organizations. Each person of a team is a unique individual with a specific set of skills and knowledge, while the team members can accomplish greater goals in collaboration. Most importantly, a motivated team can complete even more tasks and work more effectively. Therefore, as a leader, I need to reflect on my experience and the course readings to explore team dynamics, skills, and training issues.
Compared to individual training, team training refers to building strong links between its participants and ensuring that they learn how to achieve common goals. Reviewing my experience of how leaders approach team training in my college, I can state that there is a direct correlation between team performance and training. Namely, it seems that training impacts affective, cognitive, and performance outcomes, which largely depend on team size, training content, and team membership ability (Aldag & Kuzuhara, 2015).
I consider that a team-focused form of training is more useful than a task-work-focused approach since the former is the very way of how people work together. For example, when my professor used this form to encourage the class to participate in group tasks, students were more motivated to make collaborative decisions. Having a common history also adds more value to the cooperation between the team members, which cannot be overestimated in group projects.
In today’s highly competitive and complicated environment, leaders face difficulties with ensuring that their employees are interested in training. The recent study cited by Aldag and Kuzuhara (2015) revealed that 71 percent of Americans are not engaged in their work, which reduces overall organizational productivity. In my opinion, gaming is an enjoyable and simple way to organize such activities as recruitment, training, evaluation, and so on.
Consistent with Aldag and Kuzuhara (2015), I consider that games can help in making the process of learning interactive and realistic to facilitate knowledge acquisition and skill development. In the case when I was assigned a leader in the recent group project, I understood that a game simulates real-life conditions and generates interest in the subject of learning. Gaming also allowed my team to easily communicate and discuss various solutions, even though two members conflicted. I monitored the group discussion and helped some participants to help them in going in the right direction.
The readings that were completed within this course helped me to better understand group dynamics and relations. In terms of the learning theory, it became clear that individuals as the participants of a group can have various histories of reinforcement. Some of them learned that only hard work could lead to success, and others get used to avoid complicated situations. Classical conditioning clearly explains that people respond to stimuli, be it rewards or punishment, which links certain behavior to the given reinforcement. In my opinion, the use of operant conditioning is beneficial to enable the team to learn new behavior based on positive reinforcement. Previously, I thought that a single strategy could be applied to leading a team, but the readings of this course showed that both individual and group methods should be applied. For example, it is not rational to give the same reward to all team members, and it is better to offer more rewards for greater performance.
Motivation and reward compose another area that I consider to be essential for any leader to master personal qualities and promote those of the team. I have learned that the need theories of motivation state that satisfaction is a driving force of motivation, which can also be used in team leadership. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs can be taken into account while determining the needs that impact people’s failures and successes.
For example, the fundamental physiological needs should be met first, and intellectual needs can only be fulfilled after that. I remember that my team members need to be full, satisfied with the environment, and have enough sleep to think about achievement and problem-solving. In other words, the search for potential need-satisfying goals is to be followed by an attempt to attain them, resulting in either frustration or goal accomplishment. In case of frustration, people are likely to show defense mechanisms, such as turnover, apathy, or negative comments about an organization. These signs signalize the failure to properly motivate subordinates and meet their needs, which should be addressed by a leader.
Based on my experience and previous knowledge, I believed that transactional leadership is the best style of motivating employees. However, this course changed my position since I have learned that transformational leadership provides more opportunities. The identified style of leadership should be based on the sincere desire of a leader to inspire others in achieving a fundamental change. There are two forms of concerns that compose the basis of such leadership: considerations about people and thoughts about a task (Aga, Noorderhaven, & Vallejo, 2016). For example, I stimulated my team members intellectually by demanding from them the best outcomes possible.
I provided timely feedback and asked for haring their attitudes regarding team performance and my efforts as well. By listening to my subordinates, I promoted mutual trust and responsibility. In terms of individualized consideration, I tried to treat each of the team members separately and appreciated his or her work according to the results. This allowed me to assign a person the right task and make sure that he or she would handle it successfully.
My transformational style of leadership is aimed at ensuring that employees not only fulfill their direct work responsibilities but also do it with enthusiasm, putting their souls into the work process and exceeding initial expectations. It is about stimulating the role-playing behavior of employees, which requires more subtle, advanced methods of influencing staff, in addition to a traditional carrot and stick method (Aga et al., 2016). It also seems important to expand the list of my personal qualities to have the greatest chance of becoming a transformational leader. I believe that I should pay more attention to organizational culture as one of the key premises of transformational leadership.
To conclude, the readings of this course extend my previous knowledge and allow consider my experience through the prism of team leadership. I have learned that team training requires combining various methods and theories to meet the needs of individuals and a group in general. It became clear that the team-focused approach is useful to establish the links between the team members and encourage them to work in cooperation towards accomplishing a common goal. As a leader, I understood that gaming and positive reinforcement are the methods that allow engaging people in work and ensuring that they would perform it with enthusiasm.
References
Aga, D. A., Noorderhaven, N., & Vallejo, B. (2016). Transformational leadership and project success: The mediating role of team-building. International Journal of Project Management, 34(5), 806-818.
Aldag, R., & Kuzuhara, L. (2015). Creating high performance teams: Applied strategies and tools for managers and team members. New York, NY: Routledge.