A520.6.4.RB - Team Roles

A520.6.4.RB – Team Roles

Write a blog entry on task-facilitating and relationship-building roles. In your blog, reflect upon your understanding of how these roles enhance team performance.

•Consider how you generally relate as a team-member.

In meetings, I try to relate as both task-facilitating and relationship-building roles. It depends on what kind of meeting I am part of and what my role in the meeting is…am I a participant or the facilitator? It also depends on what my agenda is for the meeting and what I hope to accomplish with the time. There are times when I end up just running the laptop that runs the PowerPoint slides for a senior leadership meeting. When this is the case, I'm mostly invisible. When I have chanced a comment or question, people look at me like, “Oh…we forgot you were here.” Or “What? You’re not part of this…just click to the next slide.” Sometimes the role I relate to is that of projectionist. I think that perhaps when I am in this role that I should be more task-facilitating in an effort to keep the meeting on track.

•Do you actively engage your team to accomplish its mission?

I am not as actively engaging as I’d like to be when it comes to the team’s mission accomplishment. I feel very powerless in that respect because in many cases, I’m simply not heard. I do work closely with our team lead and he is very much engaged with our team’s mission accomplishment and so I think we all look to him for guidance. “Sometimes keeping the team “on task” is the most important thing you can do.” (Whetten, 2016) Sometimes, when it comes to new hires, I have some seniority and I try to include them in all of the tasks that we do and help them understand the “why” and not just the “how”. In this respect, I’m actively building the foundation for accomplishing our team’s mission.

•Do you work to improve the team cohesion and collaboration?

I am a big proponent of cross-functional teams so yes, I work to improve my team’s cohesion and collaboration. In this respect, I am more in a relationship-building role. We tend to get siloed as either “Extruded” or “Plate” sides and each team uses different metrics. This has been a constant inconsistency within our organization. In my relationship-building role I could work more toward helping my team be more internally cross-functional. “The key is to have a balance between task-oriented roles and relationship-building roles displayed in the team.” (Whetten, 2016)

References:

Whetten, D. A., & Cameron, K. S. (2016). Developing management skills (9. global ed. ed.). Boston, Mass. [u.a.]: Pearson.