Team Dynamics: Conflict Prevention Strategies

The video defines team as, “A group of workers with a shared mission and vision and collective responsibilities. A team shares or rotates leadership roles. Team members are accountable for one another and measure their effectiveness by assessing the output of their collective labours” (Chapter 18 Teamwork at Cold Stone Creamery)

The leader must be sure to take the group dynamics into consideration. It is important to make everyone involved feel that their needs are important. For the project to be a success, everyone participating must feel as if they are contributing and that they are being valued equally.

Trust- should be slowly built up across team members, through developing confidence in each other’s competence and reliability. Trusting individuals are willing to share their knowledge and skills without fear of being diminished or exploited.

A team is something more than a collection of individuals. Teamwork is a group of people working together to achieve the same goal. The whole is more than a sum of the parts. A team can be identified by evidence of some or all of the following:

When leading a team there must be a mutual understanding and being honest with all involved. Being honest will inspire others to be truthful, have sincerity and be forthrightness when volunteering information that the other person may need to know. (Josephson, 2002, p. 8) This goes for both leaders and non-leaders being honest will always the best policy.

Clarity of purpose increases but plenty of uncertainties persist. Cliques form and there may be conflict and power struggles. The team needs to be focused on its goals to avoid becoming distracted by relationships and emotional issues. Compromises may be required to enable progress. The leader coaches.

Team – a small number of people (ideally six to ten individuals) whose members share a common purpose, hold themselves individually and collectively responsible for goals, and have complementary skills and agreed-on processes for working together.

The leader needs to take care, that his whole group/team works together. If he does not take care of that the group could have problems in certain scenarios. For example if a group is on a bushwalking trip, they need to work together by arranging who brings along what so they are not missing anything they would need. Another example is, if the group would be in a situation, as described above and someone in their group has been bitten by a snake, the team and the leader need to work together as a group to help the injured as best as

Communication is the key to success. A team without communication could never be successful. Communication is important because the group needs a clear goal and also they need to have shared objectives. For example, in football a defense needs to be on the same page; if two players on the defense are on different pages then the defense will not be successful. You need everyone to share the same objective in order to succeed, not just a few people but all as one. To ensure a team’s success, everyone on the team has to be accountable. Everyone has a job on the team to contribute to becoming successful as a whole. Also you need trust in order to become successful; you have to be able to trust in your team that they will give their all for the team.

Communication is also a key skill to being a leader. If the leader and the people around them aren’t able to communicate then nothing will get done. I have learned in the past that not communicating can lead to the downfall to a piece or group. If a member of the section isn’t aware that they are playing something wrong it will never be fixed. As a leader I will be able to help others improve and communicate with them what they can do in the future to prevent the same mistake from happening.

Team building focuses on guiding a company’s employees in a constructive manner in order to improve knowledge and skills and be able to use the newly acquired skills and knowledge to work collaboratively to fulfill a common objective. Teams that have been trained and know how to work together smoothly and successfully have the potential to save a company from pending disaster. Team building has the potential to help a company become more successful because it enables a company’s employees to be a stronger unit and develop valuable leadership skills. Team building is an important

A common mistake made by team leaders to often is that every member within a team automatically understand their role within the team. One of the initial tasks of a team leader is to clearly assign individual tasks and responsibilities. In order for every member to understand exactly what their role within the team is, their must be good, open communication from both parties. If a team member is unclear of their duty, they must communicate with their team leader by asking questions, this also helps

Reliance, trustworthiness, consistency and rapport structure: In a well-managed team there needs to be trust, reliability, consistency and this comes from a relationship building process. This is a never ending process which starts from when the team is at the beginning (forming stage). By progressing through the stages, team members will form a healthy bond between them which will result in ever growing trust, reliability and consistency between them. To help prompt this along we would use informal and formal team building. The best way for these areas to build in a team is to have team exercises. Team exercises can be informal or formal. Some informal techniques could be to hold a BBQ for team staff as a team building exercise or drinks

that their individual job and overall team goals are met while being able to put trust into the other

Formed to carry out a particular task, members will be people with common interests, usually from the same background and attitude.