A631.2.5.RB- Cooperation and Competition

When I was going to college… the first time, it was the most dreaded three words “get into teams”.  I should probably examine my trust issues because trust was something that perhaps does not come naturally to me. I don’t trust. I do not have many past examples in my life to make me feel as if trusting and letting go of my safe control and hoping for the best is an ideal attitude. Successful outcomes are by good design and preparation. I had so many ups and downs with math in high school that honestly my family did not think college would be such a good fit for me. I brought home my first ever straight A’s during my first semester of college. It was one of my proudest accomplishments and was not the last time I received them, for the record. Sadly like a sucker punch to my ego my ‘mom’ asked me if I thought getting a two year technical degree would be more sensible because she could not see me making it through four years of school and with a trade at least I would have something to fall back on. By the time I was a junior in college I was not going to trust someone who showed up to class to merely just pass the time with my tuition money and my one chance to prove to myself and others that I could overcome those prejudgments I faced in those early days at community college.

Group work team leader? More like group work czar, dictator of winning only. Sometimes I gave others a chance, but not everyone is as high strung as I am. In Spanish we had group quizzes. The team thought there was too much material to thoroughly cover so we would routinely break up sections and that person would inform the team during the quiz on their assigned subject matter. Secretly I studied all of the material. I did not trust. Luckily I had this inclination because sleepy partner or lazy friend would show up and when the quiz started say, oops, I didn’t do my section, I guess we will have to guess. Not cool. There was no charter, nothing to hold us accountable for our responsibilities, actions, or inactions. 

Flash-forward (cough) years later from my college graduation with my Bachelor’s degree and I have embarked on another educational pursuit. This time it is a Master of Science in Leadership and those diehard habits of refusing to relinquish control will no longer fulfill the requirements of group work. Entering into group work now it is hard to tell if you should proceed with arms wide open or with your battled armor ready, but I get it. There is a lot on the line when you are pursuing a graduate degree, it does not come easy and it does not come cheap; I know how much it is per credit hour. 

Acknowledging the high importance aside, I am taking an online class and am paired in a virtual team. It is blend of being a natural work team, since we share the same type of work due to the structure of the program; however, just like a temporary task team, the band is going to break up in nine weeks. Parting is such sweet sorrow. I hope. We have an uphill battle because my team was composed of individuals in Indonesia, the UAE, and Afghanistan. I am holding it down for America and am representing from Florida. While I am sleeping, I have a team member that is twelve hours ahead of me. He already knows if Halloween is going to be a good day or not before I even wake up! 

This is a factor that surely inhibits our ability to make decisions and solve problems, as phone calls and text messages are not really an option. It is also not like we can set a block of time aside and work together in real time. We have been relying on our handy, dandy discussion board within our class and it has been doing the trick for central communication. To throw a wrench into the mix, my previous team member from my class prior to this ended up dropping the course. We received a new member at the beginning of week two while we had already begun input into our team. But hey, I have a buddy stateside (I think) so it is half global, half local! This week we are focused on the formation of our team and have been preparing a charter, which will guide our processes and operations and also create a backbone for problem solving and taking corrective action so that no one can fall asleep on the job. 

Right out the gate during the first week I received a super intense email from one of my team members that wanted to feel us out and ask some probing questions, I think just to see if we are on the same page. It asked things like how much time are you willing to devote to the team assignment, outside of our other assignments and, what type of grades are we interested in receiving. Bad Casey was tempted to say that a “C” only gets you on academic warning if it is the first time. But alas, as much as I want to tease my teammate…in my mind… to ease the tension, I appreciate an honest, direct approach. Just because I did not say it myself, does not mean I was not thinking it. Something like that could have been an issue concerning the authority or power for our team. There was a great deal of worrying about “me” and the high concern for self could have dominated and overthrown the focus instead of really being about the team, but rather being about the task accomplishment. Are we here to learn? Are we here to get certain grades? Are we here to collaborate? From that there was a step back and we were all able to share our voice and those mirages that you thought was trouble on the horizon was just a little bump in the wavy pavement. No big deal. 

In full disclosure I wondered if I was going to end up on the other side of my former group work czar character from years past, not just with one team member, but all of them. I have kept a watchful eye on my classmates whether we are attached as a team or not. I noticed how early, how eager and active they have been in the class discussion boards. I would say I am a middle of the tier, I show up on time to the party. Not too early and not fashionably late. I like talking but make a point to share extra if I feel I have something important or useful to say. I also noticed in the creation of the charter that a potential obstacle mentioned is that we may not all approach assignments the same way. I cannot help but feel this is directed at me, but to be fair, it is probably an accurate assessment. I have never exactly fit in, but what I think my team is starting to learn is that I can blend in as much as I may stand out. Glitter is my favorite color and I may seem too involved with pop culture. My examples lean toward the modern, the artistic. I am not strictly academic in tone or voice. I am a younger lady while my team members are gentlemen; of course we are going to think differently. The way I see it is that I am a Taylor Swift; they may be a Garth Brooks, an Allen Jackson, and a George Strait. We all do the same thing (country music… leadership…) but have a different way going about it, but at the end of the day there is room for us all to be wildly successful. There is not one right way. I hope this is something I can share with my team, or anyone I encounter, really. The things I think that made me feel apprehensive, will ultimately be very positive behaviors for our team to be successful in completing our tasks. An honest, direct, cohesive, timely, driven, thoughtful contribution is what I expect to see from us. Now that we are past establishing who we are, I think we are going to hit the ground running with collaboration and not fret about competing with each other. 

Some positive interventions that I have witnessed from the charter process alone ties in with our collective concern for high quality work and to make a charter that will be able to stand on its own.  The idea was presented by one of our group members to synthesize and clarify our individual input and summarize the work into a different type of document, a word document versus the standard form. It is something I have never seen done before. It is not a difficult thing to do, but it shows how our team is willing to push for a little bit more than is usually done. Frankly, we are such quick communicators that instead of procrastinating and dragging our feet with our responses we have been quick with the decisions we have made. We know what we want, it has been made clear, and we are ready and willing to go out and get it, which is really what a high-performance team is all about.

Reference:  Brown, D. R. (2011). An Experimental Approach to Organization Development (8th ed.). Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.                                         

A631.1.5.RB- EcoSeagate

Have you ever craved the great outdoors, total freedom from the daily minutiae that encompasses us? Have you contemplated if you could push yourself to the brink of exhaustion and still push on… you versus the elements by submersing yourself into the wilderness by climbing mountains, traversing canyons on cables, running, biking torturous terrain, facing icy rushing waters all with just a vague map? Can you think of a time when you were so dependent on other people to truly work as a team where everyone needed each other entirely and no one had the upper hand? You probably heard airline tickets to New Zealand are pretty pricy; wouldn’t you like to travel there? What if your company footed the bill, that they could take you there, you deserve it right? Can you become a team with people you maybe have never met and adventure race to the finish line in those outdoor conditions? Well, if you answered yes to the above questions, if they piqued your interest and sense of adventure, Seagate Technology may be the place for you. (Not me.)

Bloomberg Businessweek described Seagate Technology in 2006 as the world’s biggest makers of hard drives. Around the early 2000’s the employees had a quaint way of describing their organization, “Slavegate” and people were frequently fired (Brown, 2011). CEO Bill Watkins felt that the company needed to be shaken up and turned around, showing that teamwork had value. His way of doing so was to start Eco Seagate, an outdoor lab experience. Out of thousands of employees located globally, two hundred employees apply and are selected to participate. This requires physical conditioning, reading The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable and of course, volunteering yourself to participate. 

According to Brown, outdoor experiential laboratory training, which parades with many other monikers, brings a group of people together outside of a work setting to participate in exercises which are typically foreign. The point is so that no one has an advantage or upper hand (Brown, 2011). “Thus the outdoor lab puts participants on an equal footing. This seems to encourage discussion of leadership styles, teamwork, and interpersonal relationships.” (Brown, 2011, p. 273) Outdoor labs can be intense like adventure racing or more leisurely and should fit the needs of the organization, teams, and participants. Brown details the importance of the outdoor lab fitting into an organization’s goals, which will “fit into a large program that lays the groundwork for it and follows through after it has ended.” (Brown, 2011, p. 275) 

The most surprising part of EcoSeagate is not the enormity of the extreme sport and conditions, but the price tag, which is two million dollars each year. Since outdoor labs are relatively new with little empirical research, there is no evidence of results of the effectiveness. Call me reckless with abandon, but I did a little basic poking around on the internet and the cost of the lab juxtaposed with their revenue change my perspective on the cost and it doesn’t seem wholly outrageous. Brown (2011) warns that without prior groundwork and follows through after the outdoor lab it could turn into an expensive company retreat that does not reap long term benefits. So, the big question that looms in the foreground, is it worth it?

Admittedly I am a complex blend of both supportive and skeptical. Part of my bias stems from the safety gene I was born with and I know that I am not a good physical candidate for such feats. I did gymnastics for about a decade and while most of the time I could maneuver a four inch balance beam, I cannot ride a bike without crashing into very obvious and stationary walls and such. I am the clumsiest coordinated person who has no business on the side of any mountain.  With that objection covered and tucked away, I really think it comes down to the individual whether it is effective. I feel that being totally open to the lab would be very important, not just signing on to travel or get away from work for a week. Each person also has been shaped from their own unique experiences and no two are alike. The effectiveness a person could be different from person to person. Without cynicism, I think that something that extraordinary and daring likely has an everlasting impact.

Sometimes you do not really know yourself or understand others until you face something out of your comfort zone. Adversity tests us all. I believe this because I experienced it early on in my lifetime and although it seems cruel and without purpose while you are going through the thick of it, it changes your perspective in indescribable ways. There are things that once seemed so important that once you pulled back were trivial. In the same way studying abroad can dunk you into the deep end and you just learn to swim, I imagine the outcome to be tantamount. At the very least if teamwork and development did not stick it is a great idea for employee attraction and perhaps retention. Nothing builds morale like reward, although Seagate employees are quick to point out that this is not a vacation (Seagate’s Morale-athon, 2006). I think that there is merit to team development process. Take a look at the Youtube videos and you see people pulling each other up a mountain while hiking or grabbing another person’s bicycle from them so you can get out of the river. It reinforces behaviors to think of others, help others, and ask for help for your own benefit.

For the same reasons I think it is necessary for high-performing organizations. Throughout the videos the CEO spoke on concepts such as trust and commitment, embracing healthy conflict, and other topics. If you think about what a high performance team is, it is a group that works so well together to meet their goals that they outperform the competition. To accomplish something of that caliber there is a lot of trust and commitment. For example, if you were to launch something never before seen and exceptional in concept but unknown in execution and market performance you have to be able to trust that your ideas will become more, become actualized and succeed, that the work and all you put into it will pay off. It takes commitment to choose that unknown path and continue down it. In the way that the cost is extreme just like the outdoor lab, it takes something like this that is so dramatic and so different to separate yourself further from other organizations. To be successful, more successful than others, sometimes you have to push beyond what is common and the current standard. 

When I think about my organization and whether something like this would be a fit I am torn. ERAU as a whole actually has some exuberantly fit and game individuals. I am completely unsure how it would go over with others, since participation is voluntary. I can picture this being a positive experience for some and a negative experience for others. When I think about my department I would like to think it would bond us, but it may cause a divide between those who want to and those who do not. Although I would prefer a spa and a king sized bed experience, I would be willing to give it a go in a more sensible, less EcoSeagate format. My particular team, the graduate advising team, has thrown around the idea of trying to get permission to go on the big obstacle course used for military science. I think only time would tell if it would have the kind of return we are looking to gain.

References:   

Brown, D. R. (2011). An experiential approach to organization development (8th ed.). Boston: Prentice Hall.

Eco Seagate 2008 1/3. (2008, April 25). YouTube. Retrieved October 23, 2014, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCOfOFMiLtE&feature=youtu.be

 

Eco Seagate 2008 2/3. (2008, April 26). YouTube. Retrieved October 23, 2014, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Etwuap-_Azk&feature=youtu.be

 

Seagate's Morale-athon. (2006, April 2). Bloomberg Businessweek. Retrieved October 23, 2014, from http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2006-04-02/seagates-morale-athons-morale-athon

A630.9.4.RB- Hiring and Recruiting

Google, it is such a powerful, popular word. Ellen DeGeneres joked that “if you need to know something immediately, you can Google it now… Ten years ago, if you said you were going to ‘Google’ someone, you got written up by Human Resources.” It is a search engine, and one of the top five websites in the world, but it is also so much more. Google is a company that is a culturally unique leader of industry that carries out visionary pursuits while not really being managed. According to Eric Schmidt, Google has a Borg-like quality, it just keeps moving forward.

If you do not know much about Google as an organization, just know this: it is so much cooler than anywhere you could dream of working. If you can dream up what would be a benefit that you wish you had, Google probably has it and then a bunch of other stuff you did not think to ask for because you did not know that you could have it or that it was a work perk. So how did Google become Google? Eric Schmidt says it is all in how you build a company, you determine the culture, the people, and the style and that it is important who you hire at every level. According to Schmidt, all of the management books tell you to consider the academic quality, intelligence, intellectual flexibility, passion, and commitment, but that nobody does it. He also states that you need to build a culture where people are going to do what they are going to do and you are trying to assist them.

It is genius in simplicity; Google chooses the right type of people and enables them with genuine employee empowerment. “Employee empowerment is a technique for unleashing human potential in organizations.” (Brown, 2011, p. 223) Employees at all levels share a vision and engage in the organization, which allows for individuals to be more effective and contributes to improving the entire organization (Brown, 2011). “Excellence is achieved by organizations that push risk taking and decision making down to the lowest possible level.” (Brown, 2011, p. 224)

I imagine that creating a company can feel like having a baby, an extension of your own life, and it takes a lot of confidence to nurture the organization and then bravely push it out of the nest and let it fly. I can imagine, for many reasons, why most organizations fall short of Google’s success. When you grow a business you are pouring your time, energy, ideas, life’s work, and money into it and it must be very difficult not flinch because you are afraid you put all of your eggs into one basket. I am sure resources run low and corners get cut. It takes an enormous amount of courage to have and implement this point of view. While I think it sounds like a no brainer in theory to want to choose these amazing Google type employees, attracting and retaining are another story. Truly quality individuals that know their worth and what type of environment they want to work in require incentives, in various forms, to keep those types of people sticking around. There must be symbiosis to make it work, much like a game of Jenga, imbalanced calculations can cause it to come crashing down.

Google’s culture could easily backfire. Any visionary plan has the possibility of failing. I know this from very technical reasons. Google does not keep it a secret their ingredients to success. Even with the ingredients it takes talent and execution while keeping a watchful eye that is constantly renewing and editing throughout the process. My proof is something called Pinterest fail. If you have not had the divine privilege to be treated to the visual hilarity that ensues when crafting projects go horribly wrong, “google” Pinterest fail and see the inspiration versus the outcome. I can usually keep myself together until about the eighth fail and then it just tickles me. I mean, finding ideas on Pinterest usually provides “how to” instructions and pictures for reference, but sometimes it just does not go as planned. If something like a DIY project can fail, sure, the approach Google uses could backfire, too. I just do not think it will, not because of my devotion to all that is Google, but I feel they will not fail because they understand the fragile balance the organization rests upon.

In my organization, I can commiserate in the trials and tribulations of the hiring and recruiting process. The graduate academic advising team just set out in the last month to include an additional advisor. I really had some skewed, unreasonable expectations apparently. I think my opinion of interview candidates may be rooted in the movies. Regardless, it was a very difficult process to find the right fit for our team. Similar what Eric Schmidt explains, it is very important to have compatibility with each other. This is something that my organization does exceptionally well, perhaps eerily well. Once I was hired I was kind of skeptical how well we fit and worked together, like there was a secret recipe for hiring. I think it was all in the interview process, every member of the grad team is on the interview panel and we all decided together who is chosen. I think so far we keep hitting homeruns. Because of the cohesive decision making process of who is part of the team and how we came together, I feel that in our department it is reasonable to view the work that we are doing to the functionality of Google’s. Our director and team leader do not micromanage us, we are not monitored or watched, we are set free, empowered to make decisions in what approach we might want to use with our students and how clever we want to be in our emails, among other things. It may only be the tip of the iceberg, so to speak, what things we are doing compared to what Google is doing and I think we could always strive to do more of it, but in general I feel we are in a really good place culturally.

For me, it seems like the take away of what Google is doing is that you cannot smother people or crush them into complacency. If you want something truly great, there are a lot of fierce ideas of how organizations could be tremendous that one size fits all work environments cannot possibly produce. I believe we teach ourselves there is one best way to go to work, which circles back to the idea of the way it has always been done. To me, this is one of the vilest phrases that can cross the lips. I do not think there is one best way to run a company because there is not just one type of person on the planet. It is a novel idea that when you grow up you can do whatever you want, but we lose sight of it. You can go to school during the day, you can go at night, or you can go online during the day or the night. You can work on weekends and be off, running around during the day when traditionally most people are at school or work. Sometimes I day dream about those whose work clothes are not business clothes, but stylish, fashionable garments that is considered weekend wear, cavorting about in the world instead of sitting inside an office building during set blocks of time with no chance to breathe fresh air. To me it is a romantic idea that there are people that get to do that. It is not for everyone, though. Not everyone does things the same way; you have to be brave to find what you want and what works for you. The lesson here is that if you clear your mind of limits and societal or self-imposed rules, you can design your life to be however you want. This is also true for building companies. Take a chance and fall down the rabbit hole of discovery and find out what really can be… I am pretty sure Google did.                                                                                                                            

References:

Brown, D. (2011). An experiential approach to organizational development. (8th ed.). New Jersey:  Prentice Hall.

Eric Schmidt on business culture, technology, and social issues | McKinsey & Company. (2011). McKinsey & Company. Retrieved October 10, 2014, from http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/strategy/eric_schmidt_on_business_culture_technology_and_social_issues

A630.8.4.RB- Build a Tower, Build a Team

In less than seven minutes, you can learn, what Tom Wujec calls “very deep lessons about collaboration” (Wujec, 2010, n.p.). Imagine the scenario, you and three other team members are grouped together at a conference and are issued a challenge. A paper bag is handed out to your team, as well as other teams of four, are in competition. The instructions are simple, build the tallest freestanding structure with the contents in the bag in eighteen minutes. As you shake loose the tools from your bag you find twenty pieces of uncooked spaghetti, one yard of masking tape, one yard of string, and one marshmallow. The marshmallow must go on top of the structure.

The Marshmallow Challenge (you can review the comprehensive rules at http://marshmallowchallenge.com) “forces people to collaborate quickly” and many go about it in a patterned, predictable way that can be charted (Wujec, 2010, n.p.). Once the challenge is introduced the team talks about it, often members jockey for power, which is followed by a planning stage, a building process, and at the end as time draws to a close in the last few moments you arrive at the make it or break it moment, the big finale. This may end in glory while all marvel at your engineering wonder. It may also collapse along with your team’s dream of success. Apparently there are a lot of oh-oh moments.

Tom Wujec said he has done this with over seventy groups. Surprisingly there is a clear classification of which groups of people perform better and who perform the worst. The worst performers are recent business school graduates. A terrific punchline to this fact is that kindergarteners are one of the best performing groups, far superior to the MBAs. Kindergartners do better with this challenge, really? Why?

As I am also in pursuit of being a “business school graduate”, this is curiously alarming news. Apparently the children do better because no one is lobbying to be the CEO of Spaghetti, Inc., as Wujec offers. The business school students are trained to find the single, best way and spend a long time planning, quickly build the structure since time is running out and put the marshmallow on the top at the end. At this point you are either right or you are not. If you are not, you are about to have a game of twenty piece spaghetti pick up all over the table. On the other hand, the children start with the marshmallow and prototype with it until they are satisfied with their structure. It is an interesting view into how the two groups look at the task at hand and approach it.

I can see this making sense for a number of reasons. When we are younger there is a sense of freedom from the things that we learn to value as we transition into our adult lives. When we are young, we are not concerned with the nuances of failure, do not base self worth on a single task, nor embrace winning as a part of our identities. This is something we are taught over time. Children seem to think as they do. If something is going wrong they turn around and try again. Adults have to think and analyze to the point of delay. While there are more wonderful merits of critical thinking than shortcomings, trying to get it perfect by primarily planning and never making an attempt allows us to get in our own way in a challenge like this. Theory needs to be applied practically and then adjusted, thinking critically through what you just discovered in the trial run. Sometimes there is only one time to get it right, but are we conditioned to believe this is the case in every task we do?

As a child I had limitless imagination and was full of creativity. I remember having a difficult time transitioning because assignments were not interpretive and carefree after a certain age. There became a right way and a wrong way to do things. Children are not naturally afraid of the word no, but adults take it more seriously. Ten year old Casey could make a vivid, colorful landscape drawing. A Technicolor paradise with a purple sun and teal grass created for the purpose of wishing to go to a unique place. If you handed me a coloring page today, I have become so rigid with order and procedure it would be difficult for me not to make the picture are literal as possible. I feel that during the quest for uniform understanding of how we relate, it calls for precise language and symbolism so that we can easily communicate as a society. This also washes away imagination in order to implement sameness.

Interestingly, a group of CEOs do not perform as well as they would if an executive assistant is on the team. This is another punchline that happens to be true, too. In my view I see it as though there are ten CEOs, for example, that is ten types of people that generally know how to do one job, the same job. If you have ten people and one is an executive assistant, now you have representatives from two types of backgrounds or two pieces of the puzzle. Wujec also points out that they pay attention to the work, they understand the processes and have specialized skills in facilitation. I believe that CEOs are not the observers or gathers of information. They are presented the information and use their expert opinions to make decisions. If you could negotiate with the spaghetti or rally its support, perhaps then the CEOs would have a better chance going it alone without administrative assistance. Alas, I have never heard of a spaghetti whisperer.

This is an eye-opening, effective way to show work teams how they operate and relate to each other as a team. This would be a terrific challenge to use if I were facilitating a process intervention. I would also like to try out something a little different, too. I could be the mad scientist of social experimentation in the name of process intervention. I like to shake things up and see what comes about. While the brain juices are flowing from the marshmallow challenge I would like to give everyone five minutes to draw those throwback landscape pictures of my yesteryear for giggles to see if anyone made my purple sun. If my conjecture is correct, the trees, water, sky, and sun would be made their traditional colors. After the drawings were complete I would like to point out how lovely they all were, but that to innovate it is important to occasionally execute something that you do not normally do, there are no rules on a coloring page, it is blank and open to interpretation. We used to see this as children, but now it is usual to structure everything from our adult points of view. To push beyond what we always do and to improve any process or invent a better practice; being creative, including feeling able to be creative together, should be a tool you are comfortable pulling out of your back pocket from time to time. I would then ask the groups to get back together, take the same page, and decide how to color the picture. If for no other reason, this can show that process intervention is fun, but also allows different methods in a safe environment. If needing new ideas is needed in the group, this type of activity would allow the individuals and group to learn to diagnose and solve their own problems. 

Regardless the activity, though I would love to try out the coloring contest, there are relatable connections to process intervention. There are five areas that factor into group performance: communication, member roles and functions, leadership and authority, group norms and growth, and problem solving and decision making. To improve performance, group building and maintenance functions allow positive behaviors to help grow the member’s relationships (Brown, 2011). Harmonizing reduces conflict, encouraging helps develop ideas, quiet members feel able to contribute, and gatekeeping gives everyone a chance to be heard. More heads are better than one; if you pull from everyone’s strengths, you will have strengths you didn’t previously have within seconds of coming together. “A practitioner’s process interventions should be as brief and crisp as possible and focus on only one level of behavior at a time” (Brown, p. 203). There are many types of process interventions that can be used such as: clarifying, summarizing, synthesizing, probing, questioning, listening, reflecting feelings, providing support, coaching, counseling, modeling, setting the agenda, feeding back observations, and providing structural suggestions (Brown, 2011).

I love the marshmallow challenge and really enjoyed watching this video because it reminded me not to lose parts of myself, such as childlike wonder and the tenacity to keep going and tinkering until something is improved. Quitting or not trying is far more damaging to the task at hand than getting it wrong and working to fix it. This encourages me to practice this in all aspects of my life and to show others to do the same.

References:

Brown , D. (2011). An experiential approach to organizational development. (8th ed.). New Jersey:  Prentice Hall.

Tom Wujec: Build a tower, build a team | Video on TED.com. (February 2010). TED: Ideas worth spreading. Retrieved September 30, 2014, from http://www.ted.com/talks/tom_wujec_build_a_tower.html