Individual Differences within a Team Charter University of Phoenix Individual Differences within a Team Charter At University of Phoenix, Learning Teams play an important role in the accomplishment of collaborating and developing effective leaders (Learning Team Toolkit, 2004). A team charter provides a starting point for the team to identify strengths and weaknesses of each member that will help develop a stronger Learning Team.
More specifically, a team charter, is the procedure by which a team meets at the beginning of its processes to describe its mission or task, to set its goals, to secure commitment by members to the achievement of those goals, to plan, and to allocate its resources (Learning Team Toolkit, 2004). Every member of the Learning Team provides to the team charter: contact information, skills to contribute or develop, goals for the assignments or group process goals, ground rules to set up meeting schedules or communication methods and conflict management to overcome between team members.
Include the Learning Team member’s personality type, listening skills and trust when creating a team charter to determine strengths and weaknesses. Each member brings to the team varying degrees of personalities, listening skills and levels of trust. An assessment of the Jungian 16-Type Personality revealed that members of the Learning Team B ranged from unconventional to people-oriented to individualistic to good interpersonal skills. Each of these personality types brings a different aspect to the Learning Team that will affect the team charter.
For instance, the team members that are unconventional and individualistic might not work as well with the other team members and should be included on the team charter as a skill to develop while the team members who have good interpersonal skills and are people-oriented would bring to the team charter a positive sense of relation to the other members of the team and potentially good communication. The listening skills was another assessment performed for each member that showed all were within the middle between being a good listener and being a poor listener.
Even though the team charter is from an online Learning Team, listening skills can be applied to absorption of reading since team members are not physically listening to each other. Applying listening skills to the team charter implies the ability to understand and absorb the assignment and its goals. Since all were in the midrange between good and poor listening skills, this would be a skill to develop in the team charter. The last assessment completed by team members was trust. The team members have a high level of trust in others.
This can be a good or a bad personality trait. In the business world, trusting others is good in the team environment when collaborating to complete a project. However, trust can hurt a team when a member does not contribute like all the other team members causing a project to fail or not completing the project in time. In the team charter, trust will allow members to assign portions of an assignment to each other without having one member take over the whole project because of her lack of trust in others.
The skills Learning Team B will bring to the team charter are teamwork, research, good communication, providing ideas and participation. Goals each member wants to develop are setting up ways to manage time better in order to eliminate procrastination and to work effectively as a team through communication and contributions to the assignments. As was stated earlier, some of the personality traits include individualism and being unconventional which could hinder a team.
Developing better communication and participation as a team would likely prevent these traits from negatively impacting the team as a whole. Setting goals are important to a team in any environment and when set with the team charter, maintaining an idea of those goals to accomplish the assignments is important. Learning Team B’s goals are to develop tasks and timelines for each person and to communicate effectively with one another to complete the required project. Some barriers that might arise include procrastination and lack of contribution from team members.
Misunderstandings might also occur since the course is an online environment and communication is hindered when a member does not know another member’s colloquial expressions or background. Ground rules that have been set by Learning Team B include checking into the Learning Team forum every day for updated communication from team members. This would help alleviate any time constraints because of different time zones and work schedules. Everyone realizes time is of the essence and daily correspondence is necessary in the online environment.
Potential conflicts arising during the course of the class are lack of communication, contribution and procrastination. By setting timelines for each team member, procrastination would most likely not occur. Daily correspondence will help lessen the lack of communication between members and assigning tasks to each member will ease the lack of contribution. Team charters are a way to collaborate in the beginning of a course by setting goals, identifying the assignment, how to achieve the goals and how to overcome any barriers of being a team. The charter sets the process in motion, establishes key milestones and desired outcomes, but does not suggest a solution path,” (Wilkinson and Moran, 1998). By analyzing personality traits and assessing the differences and commonalities between each member, a team charter can further be an identification to develop weaknesses into strengths and to build upon strengths that already exist. Team charters contain information about each member and their skills in the team, goals to accomplish assignments, rules to follow in communicating with each member and ways to deal with any conflicts that might occur.
Following the team charter, every team will accomplish its goals and complete projects in an efficient manner. References University of Phoenix. (2004). Learning team toolkit. Available on the University of Phoenix student/faculty website: http://ecampus. phoenix. edu (Retrieved August 30, 2009). Wilkinson, Nancy L. , & Moran, John W. (1998). Team Charter. The TQM Magazine, 10(5), 355-361. Retrieved August 31, 2009, from Swetswise Searcher database.
