Objective: Learn about importance of teamwork and its constituting elements with the help of a valley crossing exercise.
The valley crossing exercise was performed in order
to demonstrate the importance of team work. Team work involves many facets
some of them being communication, coordination, interdependence, trust,
support, contribution from members and cohesion between members.
the exercise: Valley Crossing
The activity involved 3 persons crossing a valley with the support of the rod.
The distance between two ends of the cliff was more than 1 step but less than 2
steps. The activity was to be performed in such a way, that at any instance of
time during the crossing of valley, not more than 1 member was at risk, i.e. if
one person was at risk during the act of valley crossing, the other two members
would take up that person’s weight. In this way the inter-dependency between the
members was tightly coupled which is one of the most facets of team work.
It is also to be noted that when one of the persons
is at risk, that person has to trust the other two persons to ensure that the
objective is achieved. In this way, during the entire exercise, all the persons
are at equal risk and need confidence and trust between the members to achieve
the objective.
Three wise men
Crossing the valley - Detailed task process
earlier we learnt about de-skilling (breaking an element into small small processes and thus precluding the need for expertise) and its far reaching impact. in the same manner, if we apply the process of de-skilling to this problem we can break it into 9 steps. the pictorial representation of the process flow is as follows:
based on the step per step situation, we can draw following inferences:
Persons
|
First Person
|
Second Person
|
Third person
|
Steps
|
1
|
Safe
|
Safe
|
Safe
|
2
|
Half Risky
|
|
|
3
|
Full Risky
|
|
|
4
|
Half Risky
|
Half Risky
|
|
5
|
|
Full Risky
|
|
6
|
|
Half Risky
|
Half Risky
|
7
|
|
|
Full Risky
|
8
|
|
|
Half Risky
|
9
|
Safe
|
Safe
|
Safe
|
- Safe - Both the legs of the person have full support
- Half Risky – One leg in the air and the other leg has support
- Full risky - Both the legs are in the air without any support
- Half risky – One leg is in the air and the other leg has support
- Safe - Both the legs have full support
Lessons Learnt
Responsibility
When a team
is assigned a work or has to achieve an objective, each member of the team
should be responsible enough to complete their portion of the task. If even one
member of the team is not responsible to complete their portion, then the
entire objective is at a risk and can lead to harsh consequences.
Communication
During the process of performing a task, there
needs to be effective communication between the group members for two main
reasons.
The first
reason can be to know the status of the work performed so that the percentage
task completion of the task can be gauged The second reason can be related to
the clarity of the task between the members. If even one member interprets the
task incorrectly, the whole objective of the group is put at stake.
Confidence and
Trust
The organization cannot be successful if there is
no element of trust in it. As in the case of valley exercise, persons can take
the risk to cross the valley only since they trust the other two. Similarly for
the organization to be successful, managers and workers have to follow the
Theory X which tells the people or managers have trust on the other people or
employees for the job to be completed effectively.
Innovation
When the
team members have gelled , then innovation is something that comes on its own.
A good team always has a good number of people who come up with innovative
ideas all the time.
Clear goals The
goals were clear, defined and each member in the team fully understood the
gravity of the problem.
after all, as it is said:
One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bonafide stupidity, there ain't nothing can beat teamwork.
We shall discuss more about organization management principle in future. please write your comments and suggestion.