Day 6 in MIT Sloan Fellows Class 2023, Leadership and Teams Lab -3
The first reflection and conversation.
"What makes teams fail? Let's think about spy movies such as 007. Why do enemies fail every time? What makes them fail?"
There was a variety of answers.
- Competition rather than collaboration
- Leadership only in one direction/ dominant leader
- Micromanagement
- Homogenous team
- Only email communication
- Lots of MBA consultants(LoL)
These pitfalls are totally applicable for actual organizations.
Then, we reviewed Hackman's teamwork fundamentals.
Why we should build a team? Is it necessary?
Does the team have a compelling purpose?
Does the team understand the following three components and allocate them into the optimized shape?
- COMPOSITION:skills, background, motivations
- STRUCTURE: structure in the team, better negotiation, efficient
- DYNAMICS: conflict management etc
Cross-cultural awareness and perspective taking and getting
When we face cultural differences, there are always trade-offs.
- Tradition vs new ways
- Relationship vs performance
- individual vs team
- systematic structure vs agile/flexibility
- long-term vs short-term
If we equip ourselves with cross-cultural awareness and multiple leadership according to any organization and culture, we can foster curiosity, decrease judgement and improves our capacity to motivate and develop others.
