Management Lessons Learnt Even Through Three Idiots Crossing a Valley

What? Why??
When several workers come together to achieve a high common goal , thereby giving more significance to collective success over  individual gains, then that is called team-work.

Since prehistoric times, man has been working in teams to realise dreams that would have been impossible for him to go alone.

Ants working in a team

The Situation at The Valley

Team work v/s Individual work

This problem was presented to us in the class while discussing about team-work. The message was self evident and beautifully depicted.
3 people have to carry a payload(a log in this case) and deliver it to the destination. But there is a problem, there is a valley like gap in between where each member has to rely on other two to cross. 
Would this have been possible had it been a single individual? No. 
What makes the difference now? Its the TEAM. Each of the member can now hang on while crossing the valley from the other two and also provides support when his team mates are endangered.


This is how the entire activity will get completed:

Observations:

• Each team member is fully safe once and half safe twice i.e. the risk is distributed.
• All of them will have to safeguard each other when they get into a risky situation i.e. the work is equitably distributed.
• All of them have to ensure instantaneous communication and cooperation to finish the task.

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

These 3 key points can be applied to any scenario of team-working.

Organisation, Work & Planning

The aim of an organisation is to increase Co-operation and decrease Co- ordination.

We know that management involves Conceptual, Human and Technical Management.

With the confluence of these three aspects, organisations strive to leave a lasting impact on the society.

The 3 concepts around which organisations are created are:

1. Work: Physical organisation of work

2. Authority: Identifying who is the boss. Can be centralized or decentralized

3. Control: Formal and Informal culture of the organisation. Involves standardization, formalities and systems

For these 3 concepts to be implemented, the first step is Planning.

This brings us to the 3 knobs of planning-

• Work Planning
• Authority Planning
• Control Planning

Every manager knows the power of Teamwork. In fact the very existence of a manager can be attributed to the phenomenon of 'Teams'. If human beings had long decided to do every task individually, the world would have been a totally different place. The Valley Crossing exercise purely focussed on learning this phenomenon called 'Teamwork'.

Learnings from this exercise:

1) Concept of Super Teams & Self Manager Teams: Super Teams or High performance teams is a concept which has been successfully adopted by many big corporations like GE, Krafts food, Boeing etc. It can be defined as a group of 3 to 30 workers drawn from different areas of a corporation to solve problems faced daily. The valley crossing exercise had many characteristics of a super team like:

Participative leadership – different from the tradition approach of a authoritarian team leader.

Open and clear communication – Communication is the key to crossing valley effectively.

Mutual trust – Every person needed to trust each other completely especially when their feet was off the ground.

Managing conflict – dealing with conflict openly and transparently and not allowing grudges to build up and destroy team morale

Clear goals – The goals were clear, defined and each member in the team fully understood the gravity of the problem.

Defined roles and responsibilities – each team member understands what they must do (and what they must not do) to demonstrate their commitment to the team and to support team success. Furthermore the roles and  responsibilities keep on changing depending on the situation. 

Coordinative relationship – the bonds between the team members allow them to seamlessly coordinate their work to achieve both efficiency and effectiveness

Positive atmosphere – an overall team culture that is open, transparent, positive, future-focused and able to deliver success.

2) Task Interdependence - It is the extent to which a group's work requires its members to interact with one another. We see that in the valley crossing exercise it is of utmost importance to be interdependent on each other so as to mitigate the risk and achieve the task at hand. This also has brings lot of perspectives to the Team performance in reality. What I have observed is that the interdependence increases as we go higher up the corporate ladder. As a worker or low level employee, we can usually get away with completing the task without much interdependence (even though effectively using the team's collective strength may increase productivity). But as we go to strategic level, it is almost impossible to go about a task without the expertise/skill/opinion of your team mates.  Thus Interdependence and its effective usage is crucial for a manager.

3) The Flip side: Quite often we come across people who get their tasks done by their team mates. One of the flip side of team work is that our efforts may go unrecognised or even worse credited to the wrong person. In a competitive and performance oriented environment like ours, it is important to see through these ploys. Some of the good work practises that I have found in good team players in my previous organization includes:

• Pro actively helping members in need.
• Properly communicating the work done to superiors.
• Pro actively using the teams strength for overcoming problems.
• Effective participation in meetings and team events etc.

These are some of the learnings from this exercise...