Behavioural issues that were identified involve a lack of respect and trust for each other, punctuality, communication, commitment and focus.
Establishment of trust and respect
Trust and cofidence must be built between the team members for them to treat each other faily and equally. Five dimensions have been discussed by Carlopio, Andrewartha & Armstrong (2005) to foster this. They are reliability, fairness, caring, openness and competence. Trust building mechanisms used to build on the early stages of trust include (Lander et al. 2004):
Using early team building efforts
Getting to know each other
Encouraging communication
Sharing knowledge and appropriate information
Creating a shared vision
Short trust building exercises (The Team Building Directory, 2014) can be established once a week to build on these.
Goals, procedures, rules and expectations
A time should be set apart for open discussions to reveal uncertainties from the team members. Guidelines, boundaries and expectations will be clarified so that team members understand how they fit in and how much will be expected from them. In this case, the process of actioning takeaways every meeting will need to be clarified as well as the purpose and benefits of undertaking them. This will elude the uncertainties of usefulness. An online wiki for the group can be setup that will outline everything discussed.
Alternatives include:
Agenda notes provided to students a couple of days before the meeting to address what has to be done the coming week that will entail what is expected from each individual, the purpose of actionable items and value that can be gained.
Norms of acceptable behaviour can be addressed to the students. Such as, arriving on time, not to interrupt others whilst they talk, how to provide constructive feedback rather than negative putdowns and mobile phone usage during meetings.
Build commitment amongst team members
A strong message of values and goals must be laid out to the students and re-visited at regular intervals to build individual commitment in the team. A common enemy should be conveyed; in this case competition against other teams. Reward incentives for the whole team for achieving top results can be in the form of recognition in published business articles. This will help resolve the behavioural and organisational problems.
Organisational Problems
Organisational issues that were apparent from the case were causes of individuals having no accountability, role or agenda during the meetings.
Accountability
Each member in the team can be assigned a role for specific tasks before each meeting. Such as: minute taker, meeting facilitator and organizer and agenda planner for the next meeting. The roles can rotate each week to permit a better sense of accountability and involvement within the team and consequently increase commitment.
The four Ps of effective meetings
Carlopio, Andrewartha & Armstrong (2005) have discussed four steps to prepare for when conducting meetings; purpose, participants, planning and process. We will draw certain aspects from the purpose and planning steps to resolve the organisational problems identified earlier.
Purpose relates to the reason for which the meeting is held. It should be clear to all students in the team that the meetings are to construct on information sharing, commitment building, information disseminating and problem solving. Teach and foster these guidelines to the students to promote commitment and focus.
Planning refers to the preparation for the meeting agenda. The following rules and guidelines have been chosen from a selection discussed by Carlopio, Andrewartha & Armstrong (2005).
The rule of halves – All agenda items for an upcoming meeting must be provided to all team members no later than one-half the time between subsequent meetings. This will allow students to better organize their time.
The agenda integrity rule – Only items on the agenda should be discussed during the