Wintermester.

Class: COM 297 - Leading Effective teams

Instructor: Ryan Hartwig

Dates:01-04-09 to 01-09-09

Location: School of Education 103

Required Reading: "Creating Effective Teams" (Wheelan, Susan)



It's weird how that's what a class looks like on paper. Weird because it tells you everything you need to know about the class, but nothing you need to know about what really matters. As it happens, a lot of what I learned in "Leading Effective Teams" matters.

On the first day of class, Professor Hartwig introduced us to a quote. "The true measure of a leader is not what you do, but what others do because of what you do." Prof. Hartwig kept reinforcing that statement with one of his own: Your actions matter. What you do now echos in the lives of others, rippling out across our world. Thus, how you lead a team (whether for school, work, church, or whatever) matters. And how you are a member of a team matters. And how you react, how you speak, how you love, how you hate, matters.

I know this has the tendency to sound kinda fruity or idealistic, but think about it for a little bit. All of our lives are built on a series of events. Like the extremely well-done scene in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, if one thing had happened slightly differently, our whole lives would be changed. If, for example, you had not chosen to sit down and read this blog, perhaps you would have instead gone to Starbucks and bought a coffee. While at the coffee shop, you could have witnessed a fender bender and seen how the two people reacted. From seeing their reactions, you could have decided "Wow. That was really ridiculous. I will never react that way to a simple fender bender."

And just like that, your life has changed.

Yet we never seem to take this into consideration because we are only present in one reality. Our minds would explode if we were constantly thinking about all of the possibilities of our actions (or sometimes more impactful, our nonactions.)

Prof. Hartwig reminded us on several occasions throughout the week that our actions matter. This tied in wonderfully with the next huge point he made on the last day of class: saying something is 'natural' is the enemy of innovation.

We were discussing the dark side of teamwork when this topic came up. You see, a lot of people (especially in today's society,) attempt to paint teamwork as a utopian idea. Two heads are better than one, right? Teams, composed of multiple individuals, are far superior to a singe individual, right? Yet when we work in teams, the team can become our harsh master. If you are in a team on the job and your task is to get a certain project done by tomorrow, yet your day went haywire and you find yourself at 5 PM (the end of your work day) without that project done, when will you do it? In you own time, of course. The team is relying on you... you've set up norms of getting work done on time, no exceptions. So you work that night, cutting into family time or football time or Starbucks time or whatever.

Wait, wait, wait. You just worked overtime for no pay. Would your boss ever require you to work overtime with no pay? Not legally! There's no way you would do that! Yet you just did. The net of peer pressure and norms set up within the team forced you to do something completely absurd.

And the worst part? We don't even think about it that way. What do we think? It's natural. You always have to make a sacrifice like that to be in a team. It's natural. It's always been that way... people have always had to work overtime for no pay to get a team project done on time. It's natural.

It's not natural. The 9-5 workweek - 8 hours a day, five days a week away from your family, friends, people who may need you - is not natural. Two parents holding jobs that force them to leave their kids in daycare with strangers in order to pay for created needs such as iPods or TVs or computer games is not natural.

We have to think about this stuff, y'know? We can't go through our lives accepting these created concepts as natural, otherwise we are doomed to live a bland, by-the-letter life. As soon as we consider these things to be natural, it kills any innovation. We can't be innovative enough to change a tree's composition or the color of the sky, because those things are natural. Don't think for a second we can't change the composition of a 9-5 work week.

I want to end this blog with a quote by Prof. Hartwig that has been occupying my mind nonstop since Friday morning:

"If we created it, we can change it."


Thanks for Reading,

-Daniel K

P.S. I changed a few things on my blog to make it more open. Even if you aren't a registered Blogger.com member, you are now allowed to comment and otherwise participate. Thanks for your continued readership!