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The library of essays of Proakatemia

From group to team



Kirjoittanut: Lucas Pääkkönen Alvim - tiimistä SYNTRE.

Esseen tyyppi: Yksilöessee / 2 esseepistettä.
Esseen arvioitu lukuaika on 3 minuuttia.

From group to team

Introduction

I have been a part of teams and groups and I think that both are very good, but it depends on what do you want to archive with it. Hear in proakatemia we learn with our teams, so it is important to have a team that functions well. So in this essay, I will be demonstrating what is a group and what is a team, and how to go from group to team, because it is what we have been doing In Syntre.

 

Group

A group is a number of people that have a related interest, who work together and coordinate their efforts to achieve their individual goals.

Some advantages that come from groups are efficiency because they focus on individual efficiency instead of trying to create efficiency for the greater good. A group focuses on individual growth since they do individual work. Individuals get more resources as per example opinions and feedback while working alone.

But there are some disadvantages also, like having alienated individuals, since groups work mostly individually, there isn’t sufficient time spent on team building, and that can lead to communication issues and alienated people. Also, groups don’t support organizational goals, the lack of teamwork can cause a failure in organizational clarity, making it difficult to connect the work to organizational goals and objectives. (team Asana, 2021, asana)

 

Team

A team is the sum of its parts. A team is a number of people who work together to accomplish a shared goal.

Some advantages that can come from a team are that it builds on collaborations, teamwork increases collaborations, that consequently helps to support the overall goal and helps in communication and organizational transparency. Also while groups focus on efficiency, teams have an advantage in productivity, because team members assist each other´s work and help solve problems, making the work more productive. Teams have better problem solving, because more people brainstorming together the better, so teamwork is better to resolve problems quicker and more effectively.

Teams also have disadvantages as sometimes some teams struggle to make individual growth because they are so focused on the greater good than in what is best for each person. Teams also can struggle with efficiency, that can make work take longer than anticipated consequently missing deadlines. (team Asana, 2021, asana)

 

From group to team

  • The number of people has to have a compelling common goal.
  • Spend time together and learn to appreciate each other’s talents.
  • Look at the team as a unit of performance and not as a set of values.
  • Have shared responsibility and mutual accountability.
  • Individuals must assign and accept team roles.
  • Set performance standards and provide praise for teammates to meet those performance standards.
  • Help other teammates to look at their mission in terms of the teams’ survival.
  • Run meetings where open discussion is encouraged.
  • In the meetings do real work together instead of delegating everything.
  • Set short-term, medium-term, and long-term goals.
  • Report results, celebrate wins, and learn from mistakes.
  • And that would lead up to creating a genuine team spirit.

(Katzenbach and Smith, 1993, Harvard Business Review)

It is easy to create a team, but it isn’t easy to start being a team. When we started our studies, we were told that these 20 people would be our teammates during our studies in proakatemia for the next three and half years. But we cannot from one second to another start being a genuine team. We had to get to know each other and do activities together so we could start having trust in our team, but a team is never complete, it is a work in progress. We in Syntre are still getting to know better each other so we can work and learn better together.

There is no perfection. There are motivated teams and unmotivated, as Henry Ford said: “If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself”. One key way to bringing the best of your team is discovering what are your teams’ strengths and weaknesses, and focusing on how to get the best from the strengths. Also, the team members should have a positive attitude to appreciate and motivate their colleagues, so that all team members would feel comfortable and confident within the team so that they could work as well as possible.

 

Conclusion

Being a team is hard, every team member has his own goals and preferences, but remembering the common goals is a good way of reuniting the team. And just because you are in a team it doesn’t mean that you cant work alone as in a group because from my point of view the team should want the best for that person and for the team in general, so if the person would do better by doing that task by themselves I think it is in the teams interest to let him do it.

 

References

(Katzenbach and Smith, 1993, The discipline of teams, Harvard Business Review)

(team Asana, 2021, asana) read 25.03.2022  Group vs. Team: What’s the Difference? • Asana

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