Leadership

It is clear that everyone involved in the group of the MGI Team with Henry Tam wants the group to succeed and reach their goal. From looking at the information, I believe that the group can succeed with the following recommendations. I will give my recommendations and describe why I came to this decision.

It is clear that leadership, both in the person of the fundamental and the leadership of others is the foundation of improvement and reaching success.

It is a very realistic goal for everyone in the group to ensure leadership that ensures the learning and wellbeing of everyone. Without strong leaders, and achievement gaps will not be met.

But what is leadership? It seems to be a quality that you know when you see it, but is

sometimes difficult to describe. There are almost as many definitions as there are critics.

Much leadership has one person leading. Many things stand out in this respect. Leading

involves influencing others and where there are leaders, there are followers. Leaders

seem to come to the forefront when there is a crisis or special problem. In other words,

they often become "seen" when an inventive response is needed. Leaders are people who

have a clear idea of what they want to achieve and why. Therefore, leaders are people

who are able to think and act creatively in irregular situations and who set out to

influence the actions, beliefs and feelings of others. In this sense being a 'leader' is

personal. It flows from an individual's qualities and actions. However, it is also often

linked to some other role such as manager or expert. Here there can be a lot of confusion.

Not all managers, for example, are leaders; and not all leaders are managers.

Looking at the first meeting, it showed that no one had specific roles or responsibilities. The leadership style that was used in this meeting was democratic Leadership or Participative Leadership. In this leadership, decision making is shared between everyone. Those who are the leaders and the "followers" and it involve support and direction from everyone in the group.

From the first meeting, I also saw cultural barriers. There were some members of Russian background and an American person in the first meeting. It did seem that there were times that some chose to speak Russian and that could have affected the outcome of the meeting. Everyone in the group could be speaking English, but at times others in the group could be speaking in Russian and they could be speaking in that language and that could lead to miscommunication.

Teamwork is a group effort and everyone involved needs to understand the direction that the group discussion is taking. Miscommunication can be kept to a minimum if everyone is moving toward clearness, otherwise the team will suffer. To prevent these problems, the team may need to be encouraged to check with each other for paraphrasing or by asking each other questions.

Another issue could have been the work styles of each person in the group. Work styles and approaches may vary when a team has a cross cultural mix of individuals. Some work cultures promotes individual thinking for individual contributions. In some work cultures people are uncomfortable with independence on the job and prefer to be tied to the strings of the boss in decision making. When your team has a mix of styles, the team members may prove to be aggressive team players while there are those who are not so aggressive and may merge into the team and they may seem to contribute very little to the team process. It is important to draw out and get the best out of all the team members despite the differences in personality types.

The key to making the multi-cultural team work well is focusing on the objectives of the team.

Henry Tam and the MGI Team

There are concerns that a section of the team that has a certain cultural similarity may try to

dominate the team process and overrule the rest of the team. The dominant group within the team

may try to swing decisions towards a direction that they are comfortable with. This can create a

frustrating environment for the rest of the team.

The objective is that a cross cultural team can potentially deliver. Team output is usually better

when there is diversity of experience among the team players. This applies to any team output,

whether or not they are cross cultural. The chances of drawing out innovative thinking get

enlarged when there is diversity. This is the factor that works in favor of cross cultural teams.

The general agreement among experts is that the cross cultural experiences that individual team

members bring to the discussion tends to lead to successful creative solutions.

The problems and conflicts are certainly going to be there just as one would have conflicts and

problems within teams who belong to the same market. Preventive measures in areas like

communication, information sharing, motivation drivers, and group morale are called for to

assist in the cross cultural team process. The goal should be to try and build on the strengths of

cross cultural teams, minimize conflicts, and diffuse the occasional miscommunication that

diversity can sometimes create.

One of the most important issues that I found was that there was no leader. There was no

one "in charge" that made the final decision. Leadership is not so easy to practice. Leadership is

about behavior first, and skills second. Good leaders are those who people trust and respect,

rather than the skills they possess. Leadership is different to management. Management relies

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