4.6 Committees

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From the course by University of Pennsylvania

Building High-Performing Teams

60 ratings

University of Pennsylvania

Building High-Performing Teams

60 ratings

Course 2 of 5 in the Specialization Culture-Driven Team Building

Teams are essential to the modern organization, but most never reach their potential. Co-workers miscommunicate, and groups struggle to adapt to changes in the market or their organizations. When teams lack self-awareness about these challenges, performance suffers. Based on years of team culture research and consulting experience, this course helps you understand the problems that hurt productivity, and gives you tools for creating positive change. This course also guides you through creating the ground rules and structure needed to set your team up for success. You gain the skills to diagnose issues such as conflicts, groupthink and lack of commitment in your team before they get out of control. The course offers frameworks to adjust team behaviors and get the best performance out of your people. You also understand frequent stumbling blocks for common team types, such as startups and virtual teams, and learn solutions tailored to each one.

From the lesson

Managing Common Team Types

In this last module, we will look at common types of teams like global teams and committees. We will discuss the challenges that each one is most likely to face and give you some tips for how to combat and overcome those challenges. We will also hear practical insights on managing startup teams from Anthony Maher, an entrepreneur, former professional soccer player, and a co-founder of Benjamin’s desk, which is the largest co-working community in Philadelphia.

4.1 Overview2:46

4.2 Remote Teams4:50

4.3 Startup Teams4:55

4.4 Product Development Teams5:24

4.5 IDEO’s Research Methods for Product Development Teams4:25

4.6 Committees4:20

4.7 Norm Setting for Committees4:13

Interview with Anthony Maher12:44

Meet the Instructors

Derek Newberry, Ph.D.
Lecturer
Organizational Dynamics
Dr. Aviva Legatt
Affiliated Faculty
Organizational Dynamics

The next two videos will focus on the goals, roles and norms of committees.

In committees, which are teams of people brought together for a project outside

of their normal day job, performance tends to suffer due to lack of engagement.

However, there is great opportunity to have highly engaged committees if you know

what attributes to leverage and

if you aligned the committee goals with participants' personal goals.

In this video and the next,

we'll head to a university in the northeast of the United States And

look at committee work that focuses on campus and community life.

This case will help you to gain insight about strategies you might use on

your committee to maximize engagement and minimize performance issues.

Before we get to what you can do to maximize performance on committees,

let's go over two common issues on committees.

Number one, committee members have other obligations that often take a higher

priority, so getting people together and passionate is really tough.

Number two,

committee members may not know the charge before being appointed to the committee,

and so aligning their own goals with the committee goals can be a challenge.

While research about committee work is limited,

what we know is that in any team, members must work towards being self aware and

emotionally intelligent in order to maximize performance.

Likewise, those on committees can increase their knowledge of the strengths and

downfalls of this type of team in order to maximize performance.

Let's head to our case study in the northeast of the United States.

As background information, the committee is comprised of faculty, staff, and

students.

The committee member who is interviewed for this video states that the committee

has an amorphous charge in its overarching goal to enhance campus and community life.

Goal setting occurs on this community through a mix of charges from executives

at the university, and those set by the committee itself.

People at either the executive or

the committee level can set three to five short term goals per year.

For example, those short term goals could include issues related to the location of

the university, or the life of the university itself,

all depending on what is most timely.

As one example in the past year, the committee researched student health costs

in the operations of health insurance outside of the university.

Deadlines for this committee are not strict.

Goals might roll over from year to year if they're still relevant and need more work.

Despite the risk that committee members may not be engaged in their roles,

the committee members passion and

committment to goals actually is inspired by number one,

the opportunity to learn beyond the scope of one's job or area of expertise.

Number two, the satisfaction of accomplishing goals that have a wide

impact on the organization.

Number three, the opportunity to have a voice in shaping

the wider goals of the organization beyond the committee's work.

The interviewee for this case believes that passion for

committees comes from the fulfillment of personal goals of committee members.

Leveraging committee members personal goals is a great strategy to get by in and

boost engagement.

At the same time, research from University of Minnesota warns of the potential for

private interests to overtake the greater good of the group.

In order to correct for this bias, we recommend incorporating structured

reflection, so that the team can come up with a strategy to correct bias.

For example, through using outside surveys to inform decisions or

by aligning roles to provide a set of checks and balances.

On committee's, norms very much determine roles as much, if not more so,

on other teams because committee roles are fluid,

depending on whose on the committee and what the task is.

The ever changing membership of committees, and the amorphous of goals

makes it necessary for the team to establish a process for checking in.

This can be especially difficult since some committees meet only occasionally and

sometimes committee members don't work together in other professional settings.

In the next video, we'll talk about strategies for

setting committee norms to maximize performance.

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