Every manager knows the power of
Teamwork. In fact the very existence of a manager can be attributed to creation
of teams. The Valley Crossing exercise purely focused on Teamwork.
Objective:
Three persons walking are stalled because in-front of them lies a
valley which they have to cross.
Problem:
1. The width of the gap between the valleys is more than a step so they
cannot jump over it but it is less than two steps.
2. There is no temporary bridge available i.e no flat platform which
they can lay over the gap and walk over.
Solution:
Only through the teamwork as shown in the picture below, they can cross
the valley.
Learning
from this exercise:
1) Concept of Super Teams & Self Managing Teams: Super Teams
or High performance team is a concept which has
been successfully adopted by many big corporations like GE, Krafts
food, Boeing etc. It can be defined as a group of 3 to 30 workers drawn from
different areas of a corporation to solve problems faced daily. The valley
crossing exercise had many characteristics of a super team like:
1.
Participative leadership – different from the
tradition approach of authoritarian team leader.
2.
Open and clear communication – Communication is the key to crossing
valley effectively.
3. Mutual trust – Every person needed to trust each other completely
especially when their feet was off the ground.
4. Managing conflict – dealing with conflict openly and transparently and
not allowing grudges to build up and destroy team morale
5. Clear goals – The goals were clear, defined and each member in the team
fully understood the gravity of the problem.
6. Defined roles and responsibilities – each team member understands what
they must do (and what they must not do) to demonstrate their commitment to the
team and to support team success. Furthermore the roles and
responsibilities keep on changing depending on the situation.
7. Coordinated relationship – the bonds between the team members allow them
to seamlessly coordinate their work to achieve both efficiency and
effectiveness
8. Positive atmosphere – an overall team culture that is open, transparent,
positive, future-focused and able to deliver success.
2) Task
Interdependence - It is the extent to which a group's work requires
its members to interact with one another. We see that in the valley crossing
exercise it is of utmost importance to be interdependent on each
other so as to mitigate the risk and achieve the task at hand. This also has
brings lot of perspectives to the Team performance in reality. What I have
observed is that the interdependence increases as we go higher up the
corporate ladder. As a worker or low level employee, we can usually get away
with completing the task without much interdependence (even though
effectively using the team's collective strength may increase productivity).
But as we go to strategic level, it is almost impossible to go about a task
without the expertise/skill/opinion of your team mates. Thus Interdependence and
its effective usage is crucial for a manager.
3) Team Excellence: Excellence is efficiency *
effectiveness. Individual cannot achieve excellence but a team an organization
can achieve that. Efficiency and effectiveness both comes simultaneously and
has to be handled simultaneously. Effectiveness is where to go, and efficiency
is how to go efficiently i.e at reduced cost or enhanced safety. But to put
effect efficiency one has to again think effectively.
4) The Flip side: Quite
often we come across people who get their tasks done by their team mates. One
of the flip sides of team work is that our efforts may
go unrecognised or even worse credited to the wrong person. In
a competitive and performance oriented environment like ours, it is
important to see through these ploys.
Some of the good work practices that
I have found in good team players in my previous organization include:
1. Proactively helping members in need.
2. Properly communicating the work done to superiors.
3. Proactively using the team strength for overcoming problems.
4. Effective participation in meetings and team events etc.
These were some of the learnings which we get from valley crossing
exercise.
