Abstract
Susan Wheelan is one of the most outstanding human resources consultant, author and speaker, who ubiquitously utilizes her skills, expertise and knowledge to offer competent advice on effective team formation and building to companies all over the globe. Her Creating Effective Teams: A guide for Members and Leaders serves as a comprehensive manual, guiding project managers and other organizational leaders in building effective teams, and maintain their efficiency during the project lifecycle (Cokins, 2009).
In particular, Wheelan emphasizes that the group people attains the highest degree of efficiency, when it works together as a team. The work of Wheelman is unrivalled, because she as among the few authors, who highlights the importance of transforming a working group into a team, thus outlining and analyzing theoretical and practical differences between these concepts (Rausch, Sheta & Ayesh, 2013). In this work, she promises the reader to ‘assist in the transformation of his working groups into effective, powerful and impactful teams’ (Wheelan, 2016). In order to illustrate and underscore the most important points of her research, Susan saturated the work with strikingly apt anecdotal stories and comprehensive case studies. Furthermore, to help the auditors with self-reflection and post-reading analysis, the author provides a checklist of relevant questions after each chapter. These bullet points help to evaluate current effectiveness of the performance level of the reader’s teams, as well as they help to foresee potential challenges in the future collaborative projects (Wheelan, 2016).
In addition, Susan introduces the four-staged algorithm of creating efficient, effective and productive teams. These interactional stages involve forming the team, storming its ideas and policies, norming its activities and achieving expected standards of performance. Discussing formation and evolution of the teams, she devotes a special chapter of the book to each stage.
Moreover, he book contains special chapters containing vivid real-life scenarios, which suggest the audience a specific course of actions in different working and social environments. Among other issues, Susan highlights that analyzing and adapting successful experience of successful enterprises and start-ups, the teams can enter the next stage of their productivity, remove organizational barriers to efficiency, develop clear, concise and comprehensive goals and policies of a team, as well as sustaining this efficacy (Wheelan, 2016). Meanwhile, she has created special chapters, which provide a detailed explanation on how to become an effective and inspirational team leader, and how to be a contributing and motivated team member.
Chapter four of the book has been compiled to articulate and emphasize the distinctive features of the high performance teams. Thus, according to her rationale, any work group can be transformed into a highly productive team, if the members are (a) professional, (b) motivated, (c) committed and (d) have strong communication and collaboration skills. Although the team members may have some other professional deficiencies, such as inadequate discipline or outwardly irreconcilable cultural divergences, a skilled team leader is capable of ‘neutralizing’ these negative factors. Yet, the four traits mentioned above are foundational elements of any team, and, if any of these characteristics is absent, even the most experienced team leader will be helpless (Wheelan, 2016).
Overall, the work of Susan Wheelan is of immense practical and theoretical importance for the today’s managers, human resources practitioners and professional psychology researchers. The work is replete with illustrative case studies and theoretical concepts, which will be useful for both the academics, business owners and managers. Although the book received an inch of criticism from the peers for being partially over-saturated, this cumulative deposit of knowledge is an indispensable element of any professional library. Many commentators have argued that during the today’s advent of the virtual communications technologies, effective collaboration, communication and team work became eminently important (Tagreed, 2012; Hofstede, 1980).
Concrete Response
The message sent by Susan Wheelan is not only theoretical or proved by the practical experience of others. Recently, I have personally experienced the veracity and precision of her teachings during my short, yet eventful professional career. In particular, a couple of years ago I considered launching a startup company, specializing in bringing exotic souvenirs to the customers in the United States of America from the remotely located countries of Eastern and Western Africa, Pacific Asia and Middle East. The Big Idea was to create an online database of unique, handmade souvenirs like knives and scimitars, kitchenware, stone images, religious artefacts, ethnic embroidery and other products made by the local artisans of the developing, but historically eventful and rich countries.
The idea was promising, and I started to assemble the team for this project. Unfortunately, I made a mistake, which is relatable to the vast majority of semi-successful and totally failed startup companies – I tried to compose the team of my friends, who had relevant experience or appropriate skills for this project. As a result of my persuasive endeavors, all of them agreed to join the project. We had a sales manager and marketer, designer, antiques specialist and a web-developer in our team. Everyone seemed to be enthusiastic and eager to starting the development.
However, when the first stages of the prototype development started, a serious impediment arose. Even though we managed to find an angel investor, who was ready to fund the project and help to reach the minimal product value, our developer and web-designer declared that they would not leave their full-time jobs. Moreover, the developer told the rest of the team that he had been promoted to the position of the senior software architect, and he would not be able to spend more than fifteen hours weekly working on the project. The designer told that although she liked the project, she was not ultimately convinced of its successfulness and had serious presentiments that it might be a fiasco. After a discussion, we agreed that she would keep on working on the project. However, when we showed our prototype to the investor, he said that it was still fresh, the created web-application was full of bugs, not to mention that the design was not appealing.
Making a retrospective analysis, I concluded that we had a professional team with strong communication skills, but where the designed was not communicated, and the developer was not committed. Thus, Wheelan was right arguing that all skillset traits should be present to succeed.
Reflection
Despite the fact that the book is rife with illustrative, yet simplified evidence and reveals the main problems, which the teams may face on the way to success, the author failed to discuss two important issues in her research. In particular, she did not sufficiently explore the factors related to contemporary cross-cultural management and web-interaction of the team members.
Firstly, today’s work place has become extremely culturally and ethnically egalitarian (Cokins, 2009). It is not surprising to see people of different origins, religious beliefs and cultural values in the same office. Some cultural backgrounds are inherently collectivist, while others have deeply ingrained individualist thinking (Hofstede, 1980). Moreover, in accordance with Hofstede cultural dimensions theory, different communities have varying power distance, uncertainty avoidance, indulgence vs. restrain and other essential indices. These facets may occur to be critical for effective teamwork, and the project manager, or other team leader should include this criterion in the recruitment process (Hofstede, 1980).
Secondly, many (probably the majority) of projects, especially in the technology, are done in the virtual workspace. The members of the team may be located on different continents. In such scenarios, the cultural factor is aggravated by distance, because the research shows that physical proximity between the team members is important (Tagreed, 2012). Susan argues that her work should serve as a real-life guidance book for the team leaders and the team members, while she disregards one of the most collaborative environments – web space, where the projects require specific approach and special rules of interaction. To illustrate, the commentators contend that in the web-projects the team members should also be intrinsically disciplined, because web-control is always less effective than the physical one (Rausch, Sheta & Ayesh, 2013).
Action
The work of Susan Wheelan provided me with several insightful and informative lessons to be considered in my future career endeavors, social and private lives. Most importantly, I have realized that effective teamwork is a product of intense cooperation, interaction and perseverance shared by the team members and the team leaders.
Firstly, as a result of this reading I came to understanding that the concept of ‘team’ should be always distinguished from the concept of ‘group’. In my future projects, be I an employee of a large company, a start-up founder or a social activist, I will always make my team members aware of the project purpose, ensure that all they are professional, regularly inspect their motivation and commitment. One of the key requirements I will be looking for is strong communication and collaborative skills. If a person lacks some professional characteristic, this trait can be compensated, yet effective communication skills will be an indispensable requirement of staying on board.
In the meantime, when I am acting in the capacity of a project leader, I will break down the team lifecycle into four stages developed by Wheelan. To be more specific, I will utilize special management and team motivation approaches at the navigating, surviving, reorganizing and sustaining stages.
Secondly, at the first stages of my career ladder, the chances are high that I will be a team member, rather than a project manager or coordinator. In this case, I will do my best to ensure that my future team leader find me a reliable, professional, competent, committed and motivated employee. Before the project starts, I will carefully examine its purpose, deadline, feasibility and potential rewards. Should I have any doubts about its successfulness, I would better opt out participating than let the collaborators down.
Thirdly, during the following year I will explore the topic additionally. Although the research o Susan Wheeman has profoundly deepened my understanding of teamwork, as a future project coordinator and team leader I find it necessary to fill the gaps, unintentionally left by this author. Firstly, I will collect and analyze relevant literature on cross-cultural team management. The chances that my subordinates will of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds are extremely high. Therefore, I will dedicate a significant part of my academic time to investigating other cultures and their business-related dimensions. To illustrate, I have already found several articles, thoroughly discussing the differences between collectivist and individual mindsets, as well as indulgency vs. restraint societal matrixes.
Finally, realizing that some of my colleagues may be located in different countries and even continents, I will conduct a detailed research on how remote work influences team coordination. Nowadays, I know that the factors, which are mostly affected by remote work are team motivation and commitment. However, it is not clear how to mitigate these aspects. Specifically, I will clarify what motivational techniques are the most successful for inspiring a foreign colleague, with whom I do not have physical contact. Integrating this knowledge into the frameworks of Wheelan and Hofstede will substantially augment my team leading skills, and my productiveness as a project contributor.
References
Cokins, G. (2009). Performance management integrating strategy execution, methodologies, risk, and analytics. Hoboken, N.J: John Wiley & Sons.
Hofstede, G. (1980). Culture's consequences : international differences in work-related values. Beverly Hills, Calif: Sage Publications.
Rausch, P., Sheta, A. & Ayesh, A. (2013). Business intelligence and performance management : theory, systems and industrial applications. London: Springer.
Tagreed, I.K. (2012). “Cross-cultural Differences in Management”. International Journal of Business and Social Science, 3 (6), 105-11, available at: http://ijbssnet.com/journals/Vol_3_No_6_Special_Issue_March_2012/13.pdf
Wheelan, S. (2016). Creating effective teams : a guide for members and leaders. Los Angeles: SAGE.
