Today I am going to talk about teamwork in academia. The thought of trusting a team of people I do not know and have never met to impact my work, and my mark initially was terrifying. It kept me awake at night. I felt a bit powerless to influence what my work would be and would look like.I work in teams all the time at work. Some of these have been teams with synergy and focus with people who behave like a caring community. These teams have a passion for the work and each other and strive to ensure that all are heard. Others have been working groups where everyone is interested in themselves only, with little synergy and a lot of in-fighting.
So now imagine that you are challenging yourself to do a Masters program in something that you feel less than capable in and you are assigned to teams with complete strangers. Frightening! At best you imagine them as working groups with people only interested in their voices. Right?
Wrong!
They are TEAMS! The teams I have been blessed to work with are caring people who demand excellence of everyone, involve everyone in the process and continue to create quality work. I have learned more about the team process in the five months I have been in the MALAT program than I have in 30 years of work. This learning is beyond the subject matter. It's about accountability; it is about learning, and it is about excellence. This has been a blessed experience that I will take to my workplace and utilize the lessons learned to build strong, passionate, accountable teams that work together to improve education in the Northwest Territories.
I fully agree with your initial fears associated with working in an online team. I come from a strong background in experiential education and leadership in the outdoors. Despite this, coming together in an online environment to work on a project with strangers that will have a direct impact on my outcomes was a terrifying prospect. Having said this, I also admit to being excited to see if the team dynamics that exist in face-to-face teams would also be present in the online environment. I'm happy to say that they do! Trust is an essential element that allows a group to be successful in both environments. However, in online groups this trust has to be assumed right from the beginning. Whereas in face-to-face groups, we tend to have to earn a group's trust. This was something that our team coach pointed out to us at the beginning of the Link... and it is something that I have seen play out first hand in all my groups so far. I think it is the underlying factor contributing to the successful experiences we've both had. Now, if we could only find a way to simulate this same assumption of trust from the very beginning in face-to-face groups!
ReplyDelete