Three Idiots Crossing The Valley - Team Work

   "Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress.Working together is success."

- Henry Ford

Before starting illustration of teamwork and it's importance in achieving goal, lets understand the terminologies involved.

What is a Team?

           A team is defined as two or more people who interact and influence each other toward a common purpose.

What are the types of team?

Formal Team

            These are the teams or groups deliberately created by managers and charged with carrying out specific tasks to help the organization achieve its goals.

Examples of Formal Team

•  Committee - generally lasts a long time and deals with recurrent problems and decisions.
•  Command team - includes a manager and all employees who report to that manager.
•  Task forces/ Project teams - these are created to deal with a specific problem and are usually disbanded when the task is completed or the problem is solved.

Informal Team 

• They maintain and strengthen the norms (expected behavior) and values their members hold in common.
• They give members feelings of social satisfaction,status and security.
• They help their members communicate.
• They help in solving the problems.
• They may act as reference groups.

High performance teams / Super-teams 

         Groups of 3 to 30 workers drawn from different areas of a corporation who get together to solve the problems that workers deal with daily.

Self - Managed Teams

• Teams that manage themselves without any formal supervision.
• The team has responsibility for a "relatively whole task."
• Team members each possess a variety of task - related skills.
• The team has the power to determine such things as work methods,scheduling and assignment of members to different tasks.
• The performance of the group as a whole is the basis for compensation and feedback.

Characteristics of Teams :

Leadership Roles

• The formal leader of the team is usually appointed or elected.
• Informal leaders tend to emerge gradually as group members interact.
• Speaks up more than others.
• Offers more and better suggestions.
• Gives direction to the group's activities.

Stages of Team Development
The adjacent figure illustrates the five stages of team development given by Mr. B.W. Tuckman.

Team Norms

These are the expectations about how team members will behave.                                                                              

Team Cohesiveness

          The solidarity, or cohesiveness, of a team is an important indicator of how much influence the group has over its individual members.

          Four ways to improve cohesiveness.

1. Introduce competition
2. Increase interpersonal attraction
3. Increase interaction
4. Create common goals and common fates

Three Idiots Crossing The Valley - An Illustration.

Observations from the class demonstrations

	Member One	Member Two	Member Three	Total
Fully Safe	6	6	6	18
Half Safe	2	2	2	6
Fully Unsafe	1	1	1	3
Total	9	9	9	27

Learning

1. Mutual trust is necessary among the team members.
2. All the team members have equal distribution of different kinds of situation
3. All the team members have the same role in terms of effort and risk. Nobody was overloaded or relaxed.
4. Communication and feedback is essential while working as a team.Every member is important in completing the task.
5. There were equal instances when one needed each other.