In this course we are talking about teams, because I can't think of a job where you don't work with other people, and maybe it's not a formal team, but I have yet to find a job where you don't ever have to interact with anybody. Learning how to work with people in the context of teamwork is pretty important. I thought we might start with, let's talk a bit about what a team is, and then let's talk a bit about what we mean by team culture, and why we picked that. No. I agree that we work with others actively to accomplish goals much more than we have in the past as the problems that organizations are called on to solve and the issues that we're having our society need, the engagement of people with various expertise, just what's too much for one person to tackle. While, when we think about teams, a formal definition is a group of individuals working interdependently to the collective goal. We work with other people even without that, those specific elements, right of context in ways that still benefit from understanding what teamwork means and how do we engage with each other more effectively, even when technically we're not on a team. Many of us are actually on teams, and I think it serves us in both ways. That makes sense because it's almost like sometimes we're on teams and we don't really know it or recognize it as such, is that what you mean? Or we work with people regularly to accomplish perhaps different aspects of a task or a collective goal, maybe a meta goal, it's not necessarily that we are working on the same project, we may be working on different pieces of that project, but we need to collaborate with each other or share information with each other or what have you, so that even if technically we're not a team, in a formal sense, informally we engage and the way that we engage with each other we can learn a lot about how to lead people who are engaging with each other in collaborative ways to accomplish tasks that will serve our goals, the organization's goals, their goals, to accomplish important work and answer important problems and questions. Arc Markman, who heads up the human dimensions of organizations program at UT Austin, talks about navigating the human dimensions of organizations. I love that phrase, because I think it really articulates what you're talking about, which is teams are an element of organizations and we're always going to be in them, and they may be formal and they may be informal, but the human dynamics of the team environment, again, try to get away from them, let me know. I'd love to hear from you. The more we understand about that, the more effectively we can navigate that space. It's better for the team outcomes, organization outcomes, but also just for us as members, nobody likes a bad team. No, well, you mentioned earlier that virtually all of us have been on a team and we've all been in positions other than academia, we all had careers before we came to this, and then you even can dial it back to when you were a young person and maybe you are on certain types of teams as a young person. I think it's interesting to break down myths around what teams are and what they're supposed to be, because some of us have had the bad team experience or don't put me on a team project. Why is that and what was missing and what could have been there to make that a healthier experience. We bring these implicit theories about what a team should be, that it should be magical and it'll just happen and take care of itself when in reality, there really is some science behind it. Absolutely. Well, the role of a leader in helping to create that magic. Yes. But when it's done extremely well, probably it looks like magic, people can't necessarily see all the things that you're doing to help maintain that team culture that is really needed to help the team perform at its best, and individuals maximize the potential of that team. There's so much potential in teams that goes unrealized. At worst, you can turn into true dysfunction, that there is a lot of aversion, I think to or at least skepticism around, well, what is this going to be like? Leaders plays such a huge role in making that thing be the great experience that it can be.
