My experience is about project leadership in company, where I successfully transferred the design of a new research workflow into a practical utility. Teams run the world, especially in a multinational company such as company. The importance of teamwork is deeply embedded into the company’s culture: I have been in numerous company training classes of communication and team diversity. In practice, all projects depend on and appreciate teamwork. Leaders catalyze the progress, but teams carry it out.
In the following paragraphs, I will describe the four stages of this team work and how this would impact my contribution as a team member at school.
1. Form:
The idea of the workflow came to me not long after I started working in company. My job was to design a new research workflow to screen products at R&D stage to save development cost and increase throughput. To begin, I convinced my manager to support my idea and got a list of experts I needed. Before I approached people on this “experts list”, I had tried to approach their colleagues to learn about their general interest and goals. This helped to tailor my definition of “win-win” when I recruited all these people who averaged 10 more years of working experience than I had. At the end of the first week, all but one from the “expert list” joined my team.
2. Storm and Norm:
After the first brain storm meeting, we assigned roles and identified the strategic as well as the tactical objectives of the team. This was a very diverse group with members from a broad range of highly specialized backgrounds, thus I clarified the goal of this project plainly. Despite the difference of working experience between me and the others, the cooperation of the team mates, my open mindedness, and the respect to others helped to engage the team to work out the common expectations and project timeline.
3. Perform:
At the performing stage, every one actively participated in the team. The biggest challenge was the different pace in making progress of individual members. One effective approach I took was to take action-oriented meeting minutes and follow up regularly with the slower individuals to get work done on time. Additionally, I also used Microsoft Project software to visualize the project milestones at every group meetings
Finally, we delivered the results within the expected time frame for a company-wide presentation. The implementation of my idea saved a total of $600k+/year of plant cost and doubled the research throughput efficiency.
4. Adjourn:
After the company wide presentation, I sent out detailed “thank you” emails to all the team members to acknowledge their contribution and celebrate this great achievement. The friendship and trust we built from this teamwork continued and keep benefiting future collaborations.
Impact on my contribution as a team member at school:
From the very beginning of this company teamwork, I learned the value of the platinum rule: “Treat others in the way they like to be treated.” I think a team leader should have one vision, but be able to enumerate explanations of the vision according to team members’ or other stakeholders’ interest. Thanks to my international background and experience in such a multinational company, one of the most important teamwork skills I gained was to facilitate members with diverse background to progress towards the goals of the team.
I expect that the teams formed at your school would have intelligent but diverse backgrounds. Thus, these communication skills will help me to embrace the team diversity and get alignment between each teammate’s personal goals and the goals of the team,
With the project management and follow up exercise from the company teamwork experience, I realized that the definition of a measurable target and an effective follow-up system were pivotal to the health of project progress. Since then, I became more comfortable to manage teamwork progress and felt confident to lead or work in a team at your school team, whose members should have busy schedules and multiple priorities.
The “happy ending” of my company team has become a memorable one for all the team members because of the final celebration and sincere credit sharing. With your school team, I will make sure to do a full summary and acknowledgement to make the teamwork complete. Teamwork ends, but I believe that a good friendship built from your school teamwork can last a lifetime long.
