After a semester of doing teamwork with my lovely teammates in High Performance Collaboration course, I experienced and learned a lot. Here, I would like to write my journey down, share my experience with my friends, and try to see how far I have come in teamwork, and how major obstacles seem to become minor speed bumps in hindsight.
Origin of Our Team(s)
At the beginning of this semester, we came together as a team because we had decided it so several weeks ago. We were not happy with the teamwork in last semester, the reasons were various, sometimes was time conflicts among different teams and meetings, sometimes was the distinct working and leadership styles. To prevent such problems from happening again, we tried to build a team with regular members in every class. In fact, we found it was a brilliant idea. We saved a lot of time on knowing and motivating new team members since we already knew each regular member’s capabilities and working styles. Besides, we were no longer need to negotiate appropriate times for meeting within the team and avoid time conflicts among different teams, which also saved a lot of time for us. Things were going much easier and smoother with regular team members. Our original team consists of six members; however, due to the number limits in this course, we split into two teams – Team UPSTAIRS and Team TIE. Here I need to say thank you to all of my teammates for their efforts that making our teamwork coherent and effective.
Within the Team UPSTAIRS
Allen, Isaac, and I grouped as Team UPSTARIS, and we had experienced a wonderful time this semester. Isaac and I took up leadership role that making the general decisions, and Allen acted as a follower that efficiently executing our plan.
I can proudly say that we were and are a great team together. Our team had the same operating principles just like Pixar. Well, among three Pixar’s operating principles, our team possessed two of them. Number one, “Everyone must have the freedom to communicate with anyone [1]”. We strongly encouraged intra-team communication. We three are all in OCM full-time program, which enable us to meet frequently and exchange our ideas efficiently. Most of time we communicated with each other through face-to-face talking, instant messaging tools (e.g. WeChat), voice calls, and emails were used as supplements for communication. The nature of our relationship, as classmates, gave us huge flexibility and efficiency in communication, and assured our high level of performance. Number two, “It must be safe for everyone to offer ideas [1]”. Not only safe, contributing new ideas were also emboldened. All of us shared a common goal, which was maintaining a coherent team while doing our best in every assignment. We defined our best as “effectively finish our assignment in an innovative, detail-oriented way”. In order to achieve this goal, all of us positively generated and shared our new ideas with each other, no matter workable or infeasible. Then we integrated these ideas into one comprehensive and implementable solution for the assignment.
These principles were reflected in our team assignment #1 about negotiation. In our assignment #1, we were having a salary negotiation between employer and employee. As requirement of assignment, we needed to solve the problem from employer’s perspective. To be innovative, we decided to write our blog in a different way. At the beginning, we communicated our ideas every time we met after each class (at least five days a week), and tried to find some clues and put us on the right track. When we were apart, we used WeChat to exchange our newly raised ideas and opinions as soon as they came into our mind. After a few days of brain storming, we came up with our final decision, which was storytelling, while some of other teams were writing this assignment by the order of Problem-Theory-Solution-Summary. We also focused on details that could facilitate readers to understand our blog. One evidence of our detail-orientation was we seemed to be the first team to put simple sentences in the beginning of our blog to explain our general structure, which was storytelling from employer’s perspective.
Final Project Reflection
We were UPSTAIRS CO. that provides employment solution services to customers, while they were Groupstudy.com that offers e-books and online knowledge sharing platform. Both of us were interested in expanding our services in another industry, so we decided to cooperate virtually and combine resources together in a creative way. Therefore, we came up with Professional-Interest-Class.com, which would be the first mover in this particular industry. Briefly speaking, it was a bumpy road; however, we came up with a promising project at last.
Before going deeper, I would like to share following figure with you, and red line represents the current position of our project. Since our team collaborated with the evening team virtually and established the Professional-Interest-Class.com that offers interest courses online, I would like to define our Professional-Interest-Class.com as a virtual company. As I point out in the following figure, our collaboration has two characteristics, high incentives for risk taking and low abilities to settle conflicts [2]. I will detailed explain them in following section by using specific examples.
High Risk Taking
Second facilitator was the nature of our way of collaboration, which was virtual organizing. In our team UPSTAIRS, two out of three were fresh graduates without any fulltime working experience. Allen was the only one had worked before, but only 1 year. Besides, we were all in OCM programs and studied the same courses. However, the backgrounds of evening team members were totally different. Averagely, they have at least 2.5 years of working experience that made them see things from a distinct angel. Moreover, they all were MBA students, and the scope of course they were studying is much broader than we are. In other words, they studied relatively broader subjects while we studied deeper in the specific topic of management. The diverse backgrounds benefit from virtual organizing acts as a powerful means for fueling creativity and originality [5]. Another advantage virtual organizing gave us was equality that enabled us to speak and generate ideas freely. Thanks to the virtual organizing, there was no dominance and monopolizing of team members because of their position or other qualities. In our communication, every one of us stood equal and spoke freely, especially in our video conferencing. As the result, we generated many new ideas, absorbed different opinions, and created an innovative project plan.
-- Risk Taking is the Cost of Creativity
Low Ability of Conflicts Settling
The first misunderstanding we had faced was caused by long message and inappropriate composition. On Feb. 26, I sent the first email as a gesture that hoping for further communication. In the email, besides showing our warm greeting, I provided our phone numbers and asked for theirs for the purpose of further convenient communication. They replied our email quickly. However, they “did not” reply the email with their phone numbers, which made us think that they were not committed in the project and insincere to us. This was a horrible prejudice we had put on them. But we were wrong, in fact, they did reply their phone numbers in the email. As the picture shown below, we all missed their phone numbers inside the red square. None of us noticed their phone numbers due to the bad composition of the email. They mixed their replies with our original emails without blank lines. Even worse, they replied the email by using both Chinese and English, which made us more confuse. What we had missed were more than the information itself, but the positive attitudes they had shown to us.
The second conflict was caused by excess attentions on some particular phrases. Thanks to the properties of reviewability and revisability, online communicators can ruminate at length about received messages. Research suggests that rumination increases both angry mood and perceptions of a problem's magnitude [3]. I did face such problems. When we reached our final direction of our project, which was Professional-Interest-Class.com, there were some details needed to be fixed. Originally, Team GIVE acted as an e-book provider and our team was an online classroom provider, and we were planning to establish the Professional-Interest-Class.com with the combination of both companies’ capabilities and expertise. I found that finding professional lecturer would become a problem since theoretically speaking both companies did not have the capability to find qualified lecturer. Therefore, I proposed a revised plan that changed our team into an employment solution provider that in charge of finding qualified lecturers, and added additional responsibilities to Team GIVE that made them also responsible for maintenance of online platform. The problem arose, because of the leader of Team GIVE was so insist on original plan that did not agree for any changes. He rejected my revised plan through an email. The point was, his words in the email seemed to be too aggressive in my eyes at that time. I ruminated some particular phrases and put too much attention on them, which stimulated my angry moods toward Team GIVE. I attached part of his email as following picture. The words in first red square made me think that they were too lazy to change. The words in second red square seemed that he was judging me, and said I will never success. The font color in third red square was annoying me as well. Using red as font color in email is a symbol of insult, and I did not like someone “yelling” at me in emails.
The way our team and I chose to manage above conflicts was avoidance. We knew that there was a far more important issue was pressing us, which was the completion of our final project. Even we tried to solve above conflicts and misunderstandings, we may face a bigger potential inter-personal disruption rather than the benefits of resolution. It may level up to a bigger quarrel. Although I tried to ignore above conflicts and misunderstandings, they still influenced my attitudes negatively toward Team GIVE. The conflicts and misunderstandings affected our collaboration process to some extent.
When I now think back, it should and has to be solved internally. I should personally adjust my attention by focusing only on the content of emails rather than those unimportant phrases and color symbols. I need to apologize that I might focus too much on those words and cause some interpersonal inconveniences. Only by preventing and solving the problems, both teams could achieve a better level of performance and collaboration in this project.
The last problem I have faced is the frequency and preference of communication. From the beginning to the end, we only held two group video conferences, and none of the meeting had a perfect attendance. The specific time and participants are documented as below.
Although the attendance of second meeting on Mar. 15 was better than the first time, we were still missing one member in evening team and I am not satisfied with it. Besides, the frequency of our group meeting was not enough, which established the foundation of further disagreements. I have to admit that it is extremely hard to negotiate a right time for six of us to meet together, but it is necessary. It could help us exchange our ideas smoothly and build a better mutual understanding. However in fact, we only successful managed group video conferences twice, and after then we switched to WeChat and emails. Although WeChat allowed us to communicate without time constraints, it limited our communication only on written words. Thousands of real life examples prove that written words are not as effective as verbal expression in communication; we could misunderstand each other since written words are lack of non-verbal information that cause the problems mentioned above in email section. Avoidance was the solution again, we chose to get used to it. We were quite satisfied with the situation at that time and no one think to change.
Indeed, we should increase the frequency of verbal communication such as video conferencing or phone call, which is a much better way to exchange ideas and probably could lead to a better communication and performance. We can communicate with instant feedbacks and abundant non-verbal messages that could extremely reduce the risk of escalation of conflicts and improve our process of communication.
Final Words
As summary, I would like to say that although the road of communication is bumpy, we made it and overcame those conflicts. The common goal we shared and our conscientiousness brought us together and kept moving forward. All of us wanted to prove ourselves’ capabilities and have a great result in this final project. Each of us understood what we should do and what we supposed to do, and proactively assumed teams’ responsibilities. The conflicts happened, however they did not hold our back. We maximized the advantages of virtual team and tried to be as creative as we could, while putting those interpersonal conflicts and prejudice aside.
As for me, I did learn a lot through this course. Initially, I held some doubts in this team and project based course. However, I find it is the right way of teaching. Indeed, “high performance collaboration” cannot be taught in theories and lectures. More precisely, lecturing us theories about “high performance collaboration” is far from enough. The best way of learning collaboration and creativity is through real action, which is the whole point behind this course is. Thank you my lovely teammates Allen and Isaac, thank you evening Team GIVE, and thank you Dr. Frank Yu that enable me to have this wonderful experience of collaboration as well as the colorful journey of creativity.
Bibliography
[1] Catmull, E. (2008). How pixar fosters collective creativity. Harvard Business Review, 65-72.
[2] Chesbrough, H., & Teece, D. (2002). Organizing for innovation: When is virtual virtuous. The innovation enterprise, 127-135.
[3] Friedman, R., & Currall, S. (2002). E-Mail Escalation: Dispute Exacerbating Elements of Electronic Communication. Proceedings of the International Association for Conflict Management’s 15th Annual Conference, 1325-1348.
[4] Johnson, L. (2002). Does E-Mail Escalate Conflict? MIT Sloan Management Review, 14.
[5] Sadri, G., & Condia, J. (2012). Managing the virtual world. Industrial management, 21-25.
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