Managerial Leadership Course

¶ … group I am referring to was involved in several software product development projects and was formed from a team leader, several programmers and a tester, who was also in charge with subsequent quality assurance and quality control phases. One of the important aspects and characteristics of the team was the fact that, even if all the members were equally competent, each had a separate area of expertise. This meant that someone had an excellent knowledge of databases, another was an excellent programmer in a certain language, etc.

Team diversity played an important role, because projects usually had different parts and needed an overall contribution from the team. Because the group was formed from a few individuals, the role of informal leadership was essential. Indeed, informal leadership provided the appropriate communication channels in the group and ensured that the leader's message was getting through to the team on a less straining and enforcing way. Let's have a brief look at how informal leadership worked in this group.

First of all, the group saw itself as an individual entity within the company. Indeed, given the fact that evaluations were made on each team in part and on the results that these produced, the group understood that in order to perform well, the individual members needed to form a strong group. Luckily, the group was formed from individuals with more or less the same affinities and interests.

This meant that they could spend extra time together outside office hours, have a drink on Friday and informally evaluate their week's work and briefly decide what may need to be changed during the following week. Further more, they talked to one another through most office hour and, even if these talks were not always work related, they enhanced the cohesion of the team and increased performance. The team leader also encouraged this sort of behavior.

His vision was rather set on a social basis rather than strictly task oriented, because, in his opinion, it was easier to build on the social oriented base and turn it into task-oriented than the other way around. In other work, a team where the individuals liked working together and enjoyed time with one another would be more likely to perform and achieve the tasks. Such a social perspective encouraged the team to boost up their spirit when times required it.

For example, on one occasion, the team had fallen behind on a stringent deadline because someone in the team was late delivering his work. Team spirit meant that everyone pitched in to help and get the job done quicker than if the respective individual would have performed on his own. Additionally, it was Friday and the team had decided to spend it together at a pub in the city. Had they not helped, then the individual would not have been able to participate.

This social approach encouraged creativity, because the atmosphere was relaxed and informal. As I have mentioned previously, some issues were discussed out of office hours in an informal environment. Additionally, the team had short brainwashing sessions at the beginning of each week, during which every member of the team was given the opportunity of expressing his pr her ideas on the project and come up with intuitive solutions.

As such, it was often the case that someone had read about a new software program on the Internet in the weekend and thought it may apply to the project at hand or had come up with an idea that might have worked in our current situation and might have helped finish the project before the deadline.

As our team was an IT oriented team, it was often the case that the team members liked to be in time with the new releases in the area and often read specialized magazines that helped. Group decisions were generally taken by consensus, as far as the solutions to the problem were concerned. The problem usually came from the top management and was generally a software project that needed to be delivered by a certain time (as agreed with the client) and to have several key features.

In the first step, the team leader delivered a draft plan, following his opinion on the phases that the project would be realized across. This included project development, testing and quality assurance. The draft was presented to the team and was discussed, with everybody getting a chance to say whether their part could be done by the time scheduled. If it could not, then the person in cause presented viable arguments of why it couldn't be done.

This included, for example, the fact that the project used a new technology and two or three days needed to be allocated for studying it. The team agreed on a unanimity basis on the schedule for the project. This is very important to note, because it shows that the word of order in the group was consensus.

Certainly, the team leader had the authority to impose his point-of-view, but he didn't use it, because some team members had a better expertise in some areas and because unanimity enforced team unity and increased overall team capacity and team spirit. Following the schedule decision part, implementation came naturally. Indeed, because the team had unanimously decided on a schedule, they were more likely to respect it and abide by it.

As I have mentioned previously, regular meetings, usually informal, took place in order to check the status of each phase and analyze whether the trend was positive. In terms of ground rules, there are perhaps two worth mentioning: cohesion and feedback. Team cohesion went further than the issues I have discussed here above and meant that the team members needed to regularly check and refer to one another.

This was compulsory, as the phases were generally correlated with one another and this was perhaps the part where team spirit best showed its positive aspects. The second rule, feedback, was closely connected with the first. Feedback was usually on two separate plans. First of all, there was.