Amy Gade

LDRS 807: Leadership in Teams and Collaborative Environments

Team Competency Project-Individual Progress Report
When one first hears they will be working in a team for a task, assignment, or
project, its common to feel a sense of fear or concern. Thoughts of possible conflict,
task imbalance, personality clashes, and the all too common free rider are just a few
of the concerns that immediately entered my mind when first learning of our team
competency project. My lack of experience working on virtual teams was another
new felt anxiety for this particular team environment and interaction. Lets just say,
my hopes werent set real high for an overall good group experience leading into
this project. Upon first interacting with my teammates, Charles Lindberg and
Matthew Smoot, I was consciously optimistic that this particular experience may be
different than I was originally envisioning.
Matthew was quick to jump out with an introduction. He and I conversed
some via email before we heard anything from Charles. I will admit, I think Matthew
and I were both nervous that Charles was AWOL, but Matthew took steps to
determine how we could/should proceed should that have happened. I was
immediately impressed with Matthews level of activity and attention to team
communication. Charles joined the conversation a short time later, noting some
understandable struggle orienting himself with a new class and its workload for his
delay. I appreciated Charles frankness, expressing his desire to achieve high grades
and uneasiness relying on team members to help earn that. It was these initial
interactions that lead me to believe I had been placed with the right team
members. As a team member, I feel I bring organization skills and a sense of finality
to task assignments, but I also have a strong desire to succeed academically. I
believe the things we each bring to the team complement each other well.

To date, I have accomplished contributing preliminary thoughts for each of

the issues to be addressed in our Initial Report assignment. I was ultimately deemed
Project Manager for our Initial Report, so held the charge of assigning
responsibilities for the formalization of our responses, as well as to compile,
proofread, and submit the final document. In addition to this responsibility, I
formalized our response for the timeline for completion of phases, stages or
components of the project. For the Chapter Prospectus assignment, Matthew served
as our Project Manager and assigned he and I the tasks of creating our chapters
learning objectives, as well as to begin database and literature selection. I created
several additional objectives to supplement Matthews, organized their order,
identified keywords for each learning objective, provided keyword definitions, found
12 relevant scholarly, peer-reviewed articles, and provided their citations. I also
helped our team take a broader approach to our chapter, as I felt we were getting a
little too specific on some topics, especially since we still have not conducted all
research needed for our final chapter. I also helped proofread and provide
suggested revisions. As we move forward into the true working stage, I have agreed
to focus on the areas of avoiding/minimizing team conflict and conflict theories for
our chapter.
I believe we have faced little challenges up to this point. I think our team is
really functioning quite highly and all members seem to be contributing equally. For
the initial report, Charles handled the section on team norms and did an excellent
job summarizing what we as a team had identified as important norms for our
functionality, while Matthew formalized the sections on technology being utilized
and how documentation would be stored or archived. For the Chapter Prospectus,
Matthew and I shared the charge of identifying learning objectives and identifying

applicable resources for our chapter, while Charles organized the chapter outline.
Matthew served as the Chapter Prospectus Project Manager. Moving forward,
Charles will be the final assignments Project Manager and has agreed to work on
sections outlining the psychology of conflict and conflict in teams, while Matthew
will work focus on sections regarding conflict resolve and the effects of unresolved
conflict.
I think the greatest thing I have brought to the team is a strong opinion, my
take on the requirements of our assignments, and a take action approach. Often
times in teams there is a sense of group think, in that no one wants to step on
someone elses toes or seem like a dictator, so we talk and talk and talk things out
but often dont plan a call to action. I believe I have done a great service to the
group by helping to finalize individual tasks. I think this has allowed us each to
move forward on our individual responsibilities and has provided us adequate time
to be able to complete these tasks, while still being able to contribute to each
others before deadlines pass.
Overall, I have felt a high level of team cohesiveness amongst this group. I
believe we are on the same page as far as team norms, individual responsibility
within the group, and the desire for high achievement. I trust my team members to
communicate openly and effectively, to give their best, and to abide by any
deadlines we agree upon and feel that trust reciprocated. I think we definitely have
a strong level of respect for each other, as we have provided support and
encouragement when team members noted struggle with the work-home lifegraduate school balance and even shared the sweetest Happy Fathers Day post
with those celebrating new or longstanding fatherhood. We have avoided group
think by talking openly about our abilities to accept constructive criticism and work

with each other, not against. We have utilized brainwriting by accessing the
Blackboard Collaborate Group Discussion Board to share initial ideas on each
section of impending assignments, as well as to provide feedback and other
insights.
Moving forward, I think it will be important that our group keep the high level
of motivation, communication, and reliability we have shown up to this point. We
have already assigned chapter focus areas for each team member and created a
weekly check in deadline to ensure we stay on track for our overall project deadline.
I am looking forward to Thompsons future chapter on Teamwork via Information
Technology to hopefully gain some added insight on teamwork and communication
in virtual teams. I am very much looking forward to the coming weeks for increased
time to focus solely on my individual responsibilities for our team competency
project and working as a group to formalize our chapter on conflict in teams.