Leadership Skills: Planning and Allocating Team Work
This paper examines core leadership and team management skills within an organizational context at a training center in Dubai. It addresses how virtual team policies affect work planning and allocation, how team objectives are set and pursued, and what key stages are involved in planning and distributing work fairly among team members. The paper also covers methods for ensuring team members understand their assigned roles, techniques for monitoring performance against a plan, and strategies for addressing underachievement — including the challenge of social loafing in virtual environments. Practical examples and citations from management literature ground each discussion point.
- Introduction: Organizational Policy and Virtual Teams: Virtual team policy and its planning implications
- Setting Team Objectives: Short-term benchmarks and training program goals
- Key Stages in Planning and Allocating Work: Steps for structuring and scheduling team projects
- Allocating Work to Meet Team Objectives: Matching expertise and authority to tasks
- Checking That Team Members Understand Their Work: Communication strategies to confirm role clarity
- Monitoring Team Performance Against the Plan: Observation, reviews, and virtual oversight methods
- Addressing Underachievement and Social Loafing: Corrective actions for disengaged team members
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What makes this paper effective
- Grounds abstract management concepts in a specific real-world context — a training center in Dubai — which gives each discussion point practical credibility.
- Uses direct quotations from recognized management sources (Harvard Business Review, Tulgan, Koning) to support each claim, balancing theory with application.
- Identifies nuanced challenges of virtual teamwork (social loafing, miscommunication, competing schedules) and offers concrete, actionable responses to each.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates applied analysis: it does not merely describe management concepts but consistently connects them to a specific organizational scenario. Each question-and-answer section moves from principle to practice, showing how a general framework (e.g., work allocation by competency) translates into concrete team decisions (e.g., assigning individuals with high emotional intelligence to each subgroup).
Structure breakdown
The paper is organized as a structured Q&A across three sections: organizational policy and its effects on planning; planning and allocating work (with four sub-questions); and monitoring performance. This format reflects a professional development or assessment context, with each response building on the last to form a coherent picture of team leadership practice. The conclusion addresses corrective action, rounding out the lifecycle of team management.
Introduction: Organizational Policy and Virtual Teams
One notable organizational policy that inevitably affects team planning and work allocation is the use of virtual teams at the training center in Dubai where I work. On one hand, being able to connect with team members regardless of location can be extremely valuable, allowing for the pooling of resources and skills across the organization. "As companies expand geographically and as telecommuting becomes more common, work groups often span far-flung offices, shared workspaces, private homes, and hotel rooms… Armed with laptops, Wi-Fi, and mobile phones, most professionals can do their jobs from anywhere" (Ferrazzi, 2014). A virtual team can link people of different specialties and functions regardless of where they are based.
However, the problem with virtual teams is that there is often a lack of reinforcement through interpersonal, informal motivators. It can be challenging to establish friendships and let down one's guard. Team members may also be diverted by competing concerns in their own offices, operate under different schedules and office cultures, and hold different attitudes towards deadlines.
As part of the work allocation process, teams should be kept to a reasonable size to facilitate communication and to encourage even remote members to get to know one another. "The late Harvard psychology professor Richard Hackman noted that it takes only 10 conversations for every person on a team of five to touch base with everyone else, but that number rises to 78 for a team of 13. Thus, to optimize your group's performance, don't assemble too many players" (Ferrazzi, 2014). Breaking teams down into smaller units to accomplish short-term objectives can have the same effect, provided each team member understands how their specific work fits into the broader team effort.
Setting Team Objectives
"Objectives and goals help a group focus as a united team with one shared objective, and can avoid the situation where you have a group of people that are not coherent — more a 'collection of individuals' rather than a team" (Koning, 2012). Although virtual teams may have ongoing goals and objectives, it is important to establish short-term benchmarks for them to reach; otherwise, they are apt to lose focus. A good example is the current objective of the team I work with, which is to improve the efficacy of training programs developed by the organization for new members.
Although this may sound like a conservative and small-scale goal, it can require considerable team effort, spanning everything from improving the computer system to reduce delays and miscommunications when designing a syllabus, to improving employee training in areas such as intercultural communication, and finding ways to more effectively reach out to trainees to better understand their educational needs. Currently, the team is seeking to redesign the training program to make it more effective in equipping students for their eventual duties as managers.
Key Stages in Planning and Allocating Work
"Sometimes it is not an easy task for a team manager to ensure that the work assigned to his team is properly and fairly portioned and allocated among the team members" (How to allocate and control work in your team, 2015). Above all, competencies should dictate how work is allocated and how leadership positions are assigned. But alongside technical competencies, personality must also be considered. Ideally, all team members will have "good communication skills, high emotional intelligence, an ability to work independently, and the resilience to recover from the snafus that inevitably arise" (Ferrazzi, 2014). If this is not possible, then at minimum, individuals with those qualities should be allocated to each subset of every team to help ensure that interpersonal conflicts are managed productively. Conflict is not inherently detrimental to a team and can result in more fruitful ideas and approaches; however, it must be managed appropriately.
When designing a work plan, the different steps of the project must first be determined — for example, drafting a new training manual, designing new training activities, and defining training objectives. Different components of the project are then allocated to appropriate team members. A timetable is established and contingent activities are identified so that each work team can understand how their tasks fit within the general schedule and how their actions affect others. For team members not sharing the same office, this is critical, since the output of one team often determines the ability of another to progress. Deadlines are established for each phase of the project, along with check-in points in the form of meetings for the entire team. Finally, after the project endpoint — in this case, a new training system — is realized, ongoing monitoring of the program is essential to ensure that the new approach is effective and delivers appreciably better results than previous efforts. Monitoring both employee satisfaction and improvements in new trainees' performance relative to past cohorts is critical.
References
Ferrazzi, K. (2014). Getting virtual teams right. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2014/12/getting-virtual-teams-right
Koning, L. (2012). Setting team objectives. Management Trainee. Retrieved from http://www.managementtrainee.co.uk/setting-team-objectives.html
How to allocate and control work in your team. (2015). Quality Software. Retrieved from http://www.todolistsoft.com/solutions/howtos/how-to-allocate-and-control-work-in-your-team.php
Tulgan, B. (2010). There are five ways to monitor employee performance. HR. Retrieved from http://www.hr.com/en/app/blog/2010/05/there-are-five-ways-to-monitor-employee-performanc_g9fn9b80.html
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