top of page

Building A Team To Win

Global Awareness Skills

A vital skill needed to succeed in working in the media is teamwork. I discovered this on my degree course as group work formed a main part of our modules. I feel that in the past two year my teamwork skills have dramatically improved and I now feel much more confident when doing group work. However, I wanted to learn more about how to build a strong team and therefore was excited to attend this workshop.

 

The first tasks were focused on creating an understanding of the difference between a group and a team, below is a table we created to clearly show the differences.

A lot of people in the workshop had negative feelings towards group work, due to bad experiences on their degrees. The leader of the workshop assured us that group work in the real world is not as bad as at university as everyone in work groupings have been well selected and are there to collaborate.

 

Once we had learnt that a team is a group of people with a common goal who share the responsibility, we then learnt how to build a successful team. Teams are composed of: different cultures, different functions and different skills, which ensures all the needs of the team are met. However, there are many barriers to creating effective teamwork below are examples we thought of.

 

  • Cultural and language issues (understanding)

  • Negative or Bad leadership

  • Misunderstanding of the goal/having an unclear goal

  • Lack of communication/poor communication

  • Unfair responsibilities

  • A lack of support between members of the team

  • Having different standards of ‘good’ work

 

To understand how to create a successful team we looked at Tuckman’s model of success. See the diagram for a summary of his theory. This helped us to understand what should be happening at each stage to produce a winning team.

Next we looked at Belbin’s Nine Key Team Roles. The roles are: Resource Investigator, Co-ordinator, Monitor Evaluator, Shaper, Completer/Finisher, Teamworker, Plant, Specialist, and Implementer. Belbin believed that a team needs all nine of these roles to be successful, but not all the roles are needed in equal amounts. I feel that I am partially a coordinator, as I am happy to be the one to work out roles, delegate, and be mature whilst organising the team. However, unlike the coordinator, I do not off load my work to others and often find myself taking on more work than other members of the team. I also fit into the Implementer role, as I am practical, reliable, and efficient but I can sometimes be inflexible. Understanding these roles has given me insight into my own working methods and enabled me to see how they fit into a wider team of different skills.

bottom of page