Group Experiential Exercise 1

Hi, we are “The Amenies”, nice to meet you here.

From left to right: Jenny HUNG, Gwennie TAM, Mel HY.YUEN, Dr Frank YU, Amor XU

Jenny HUNG : An experienced training specialist in the apparel industry

Gwennie TAM : An experienced management secretary in the electronic industry

Mel HY.YUEN : An experienced service management executive in the hospitality industry

Dr Frank YU : Our subject professor

Amor XU :  An experienced business development executive in the FMCG and ICT industries

Why “The Amenies”?

This is how we give birth to our group name:

Names of our group members in alphabetical order:

Amor – Gwennie – Jenny – Melanie

Essences of our names being extracted, then the name of the group being composed – “The Amenies”. ( Amor – Gwennie – Jenny – Melanie + s )

We “The Amenies” is a team of four ¹MSOCM students who appreciate the individualities among us. We recognize that each teammate has his or her own intrinsic or indispensable character and personality (the essence) that make him or her so unique or identifiable. When as a team, we are more than happy to synergize and to meet or even surpass the set objectives. The numerous formulas and magnitudes in blending the extracted essences remind us of the many possibilities with and outcomes from team dynamics, efforts and intelligence. Without doubt, we strive for High Performance Collaborations!

Team Goals

See our team logo? The logo symbolizes the input of our joint but individualistic essences to the team. We expect synergy within us when we are performing our roles towards the team objectives. In the course, we anticipate dynamic interactions among us: knowledge to be enriched, soft skills to be enhanced, experiences to be gained… all these ultimately are the treasures that our team will finally share!

“High Performance Collaborations” are the honey of meaningful work and life. The standpoint of our team is to respect our own inherent essence in one way, and to capitalize and continuously develop oneself on the other. To achieve this, understanding the researches and theories behind the topic, knowing the ways to putting forward the essential information and knowledge to develop the strategic mindset and intelligence, and seizing the opportunities to practicing the crucial behavioral and interpersonal skills for the ultimate collaboration results are the goals of our team.

Favorite Topics

What weekly topics will excite our team most? Nearly all! Actually the coming experiential and action learning exercises in and after the classes will stimulate considerably the flow of our team blood!

Any additional topics that our group will like to know? Well, how about “Taboos in Collaborations”? It is amusing if not superstitious to know that some foodstuffs mutually conflict, like ²fresh onion cannot be eaten together with honey. Well, same applies to collaborations? How to produce or preserve “High Performance Collaborations” as the honey of meaningful work and life, yet mindful to any fatal conflicts?

A Myth: Collaboration is always good for business.

We are taught that:

Ø            Collaboration is good;

Ø            Collaboration is problem solving;

Ø            Collaboration means enlarging the pie;

Ø            Collaboration means win-win.

Many business leaders then like to believe that the more their staffs or teams collaborate, the better off their business will be.  They suppose that collaboration will have a positive relationship with business success.  With this mindset, business leaders often tempt to motivate their staffs or teams to frequently collaborate in the hope of establishing even more successful business.  As a matter of fact, collaboration could be detrimental when business leaders overlook the downside of it or when they overdo it. 

Actually a research done by ³Morten Hansen (2009) declares that collaboration can easily undermine performances.  The research studied more than 100 sales teams of a large information technology consulting firm.  In the face of fierce competition for contracts from rivals, such as IBM, the sales teams started to take collaborative actions. Advice was being sought from other teams with expertise in areas being appreciated by the potential client, like the technology knowledge.

Amusingly, the research result indicates that the greater the collaboration effort (measured by the hours of help the team received), the worse the business result (measured by the number of new contracts received).  The research further reveals an astounded finding that experienced teams didn’t learn as much from their associates as they thought they would be.  And the knowledge they gained was often offset by the extra time being used on their collaboration effort.

So what goes wrong?

Majority business leaders who unhesitatingly direct their staffs or teams to collaborate for business reasons may have neglected or failed to plan the best prescriptions.

What hide behind collaborative actions then? 

Consider the team players and group dynamics: are they professional in one area but amateur in the others?  How about their personalities, culture, value and belief…in relation to the business objectives? (And more? Of course! Feel free to elaborate….) 

Consider the best timing, stages, duration etc. for the collaborative actions: when the collaborative actions and their stays will add values to the business revenue instead of becoming an extra burden?

Consider especially the ³“collaboration cost”, which is the amount of cash flow a company would lose owing to problems associated to collaborative efforts.

Collaboration cost could be an immense item and should never be underestimated!

Business which involves working across organizational boundaries or cross companies, collaborative efforts would mean extra travelling, extra coordinating work, extra time and cost spent over communication, negotiation and sharing of information.

Moreover, collaboration always consumes valuable resources that might have been better allocated somewhere else, like the valuable meeting time that could have been used for new product development!

Additionally, extra cost of collaboration always occurred when players are uncooperative and reluctant to share resources or information.  This always happens after merger of companies, when two teams with different goals are forced to collaborate.

In short, our team considers “collaboration is always good for business” is not an absolute truth.  Business leaders need to be more sensitive not to overlook the downside of it or to overdo it.

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References

1  Master of Science in Organizational and Change Management

2  Bulliet, R. W., Crossley, P. K., Headrick, D. R., Hirsch, S. W. & Johnson, L. L. (2008). The earth and its people: A global history vol. I. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.

3  Hansen, T. Morten (2009). Harvard Business Review on Collaborating Effectively, Boston: Mass. Harvard Business Review Press.

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Extension

Responding to classmates’ comments on our Blog

52386135_BELIKOVA_ANAFeb 3, 2012 10:48 PM

52557414 (MAK SM)Feb 5, 2012 02:00 AM

92036234_CHEUNG BernieFeb 6, 2012 06:50 AM

52317861 Lam GaryFeb 4, 2012 11:03 PM

52357385yingyingFeb 5, 2012 04:32 AM

52280285 AU-YEUNG PhilipFeb 5, 2012 08:46 PM

50342769 Lau WinkyFeb 6, 2012 07:39 AM

Few comments highlight the important role of leadership in collaborations. Relating to our myth topic, collaboration may not be always good for business but with good leadership, collaborative efforts may come a lot easier.  It’s a common phenomenon that for groups which exhibit high levels of collaborative behaviors usually comes with leaders with clear vision, management competency and a lot of human skills.  In short, this type of leader could be summed up into someone who is both task and relationship oriented.  The task oriented leadership side allows leader to turn teams’ collaborative efforts into actions by guiding them with clear goals and visions, and come up with practical action plans for teams to follow.  The human/relation oriented side foster collaborative behaviors when bonding of team effort is needed, or when managing conflict is involved, especially when the nature of the task is complicated. 

  

In addition, we agree with some classmates regarding the importance of ‘Teamwork’.  Being good leaders, they really need to take the lead for sharing and communicating vision and mission to employees so as to achieve company goals.  Employees should be empowered to have full participation in work as a team for practicing leadership and achieving better results.

It is true that not every task is requested to collaborate and not every task can be managed by one individual.  As such, leaders and employees have to make decision how to perform it well no matter what approach we adopt after the following assessment.

Individual decision making:

1.   Individual decision making is more speedy

2.   Individual decisions have clear accountability

3.   Individual decisions tend to convey consistent values

Satisfaction implication for managers:

1.   High consistency between employers and employees on perception of job shows significant association with employee satisfaction.

2.   Satisfaction is greater when job minimizes interaction with individuals of lower status.

3.   Larger groups are associated with lower satisfaction.

Finally as indicted in some comments that business collaborations are sometimes unavoidable, the challenge becomes choosing the right form of collaborations in the most sensible way.  Most people would agree that open network is the best form as it always attracts a lot of potential problem solvers, however screening of best solutions would then be posed as another problem.  Given constraints such as limits in time, financial cost, and resources in most business circumstances, collaboration may not be the absolute solution but always the acceptable answer under most business contexts.