Team Dynamics & Conflict Resolution

Team Dynamics & Conflict Resolution

Teams have always proven to be beneficial no matter whether it is in the workplace, athletic field, school, or even a group of friends trying to build a deck. One man working alone may eventually succeed in his goal, but multiple people working together will be more efficient and productive, coming to success more quickly and possibly with a better result. There is power in numbers.

When you put people together to solve problems or issues, something wonderful can happen. They can become friends. If they become friends, morale at work or class is lifted and absenteeism is lessoned because it is fun to go to work or class again. Teams also allow the ability to develop more solutions. Teams can brainstorm together and more ideas come about. They can also discuss the pros and cons of each idea and therefore detect flaws that may not have been noticed with one single worker. In this way decisions can be made quicker on resolutions and efficiency increases.

When putting a team together, especially in the workplace or in any kind of learning environment, there are several aspects that need to be considered. Personality, learning styles, locations, and schedules should all be part of the consideration. Whenever possible a team should be put together with members who complement each other's strengths, and hopefully help to diminish each other's weaknesses. In that way, each team member receives the most benefit from the experience as a whole and therefore, the end results are above and beyond the expectations.

The personality of each team member can have an extreme impact on the team's success or failure. If a team of all logical thinkers is put together, a finished product may be accomplished, but will it be inventive? Those logical thinkers may not be too imaginative in the creation of a new product. The new product may make complete sense, but if you were looking for something new and fun, what good are the logical thinker's product to you and your company? If your goal is contemporary and inventive, this team filled with logical members could bring a failure, not a success.

Mixing personalities can be as tricky as mixing chemicals in a high school science lab. Teams are like a box of chocolates, "you never know what you're going to get", as one very wise mother told her son about life. Each team member must be carefully evaluated on his or her strengths, talents, temperament and general attitude towards teamwork. The funny thing about people, however, is that they seldom see themselves as others see them. Many people think they are easy to work with, creative and leaders of men. In fact they may be procrastinating, opinionated, petty pencil pushers who come to work to "kill" eight hours and get a paycheck.

After everyone finds their place in the pecking order, the group needs to then sort out and discuss what difficulties may arise in the process of decision making. A more adventurous or radical thinker may admittedly disagree with a logical thinker. The suggestion of the adventurer may make no sense to the logical mind. This disagreement may cause a large loss of time and few progressive steps. In the end there may be no product if a resolution is not found. Besides, the failure of the group to produce a product, the long term repercussions can be dysfunctional team members with simmering resentments, locked in a battle of wills. They may become liabilities to the company, and they may need to be retrained, transferred or fired. In an educational setting this could cause problems which may not affect the group as a whole, but lower grades may result and possibly, in a tragic case, cause a member to quit school out of frustration. This would obviously be a setback to any company and/or any team. The training or replacing of employees costs time and money. Replacing a school group member will result in lost time and more frustration and undue stress on the remaining members. Having a thorough understanding of team work and dynamics of a team, helps to ensure that all those who have a stake in the outcome can become valuable links needed to get everyone involved in reaching the objectives of the group. If personalities are matched which complement each other, rather than counteract each other, and they are taught problem resolution from the beginning, then the sky is the limit.

Teams are an excellent solution in the workplace or in a learning environment, because they can be highly productive when handled correctly. If you combine a thinker, an organizer, and an adventurous personality the end result can be a daring, detail oriented, and ingenuitive product that is destined for success. Each person in the team will bring a new aspect to the task at hand and new views can be seen. The adventurer may come up with a new idea and the logical thinker will agree as long as certain details are handled and the organizer will oversee that everything is done properly. It could be smooth and prolific. As long as the teams can cooperate and work through resolutions, productivity is guaranteed.

Physical location of the team members must also be considered when putting together a team, if the team is going to have to meet outside of the common ground: the workplace, school, etc. If extra work, outside of the regular environment, is going to be needed, the team members should be in close or convenient proximity to each other. One team member should not be required to drive an hour to meet with the team while the other members are just down the road from each other. If close proximity is a concern, another good idea might be choosing team members who are equal distances from a common location, such as a library or the office.

Today it is not uncommon to have teams that are made up of members that are spread throughout the world. Global work teams, or even with on-line education available, school teams have to consider location as only a scheduling rough spot. But, with today's new technology: email, satellite, cell phones, text messaging, and computers, meetings of those thousands of miles away is common and easily handled.

When putting together teams in the immediate workplace, schedules are not generally a concern, they are considerations which must be taken into account in an educational setting. Often times those seeking higher education have many other irons in the fire which can make scheduling with team members a little complicated. By speaking with everyone before setting a team up, the availability and schedules of those possible team members may be taken into account. This should allow teams to be put together which would be able to successfully