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.
