Dan Corbett Thoughts and Mountains

MBA Lessons Learned #1: Team Building, Performance, and Leadership

I recently completed my MBA at the University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business and have been looking back at my notes from the effort.  While the courses have decidedly improved my knowledge base, perhaps the most important lessons occurred supplementary to the classroom. The next few posts will be a chronicle of the lessons outside of the textbooks that I took from my MBA program.

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In a MBA program just about every class will have team projects (I cannot remember a class that we did not have some sort of collaborative efforts).  Below are some of the keys I took from the program for team success.

1) Team Selection
Sometimes you get a choice in your teams, sometimes you do not (in which case, you can skip past this section).  If you do, use it wisely.  You want to make sure your team is stacked with a group that is diverse (more on this shortly), flexible, compatible, and engaged with a comparable work ethic.  Selecting a really smart person who is “always” right can quickly kill any team unity; the same goes when half the team just wants to pass while the other half is trying to maintain a high GPA.  By selecting a group with similar expectations and desires (project related - not career), your team will be better able to function to succeed.  A haphazardly assembled and ill-advised team is sure way to set up failure.
The team formation is a good time to assign a leader.  Almost all teams need a leader to manage the process, resolve disagreements, and be a point of contact with the class/professor amongst other things.  Only once in my program did I have a team where my partner and I worked so well together that virtually everything below was a moot issue for us; we could challenge each other and yet still work almost perfectly in sync (if I ever have the need and opportunity for a business partner, I will be calling him first).  On every other team, we definitely needed a leader.  Sometimes this will be the person with the most passion for the project, others it will be a randomly selected individual.  You should not always be the leader, nor should you always be a team member; doing both will allow you to practice and observe good (and bad) leadership techniques.  Of course sometimes the leader will not be effective.  In these cases you might have/need to assume leadership; while this may not be the best to help the leader develop you might be surprised how many times they are grateful you took over and saved the project.  This too is an important lesson to take with you outside of the MBA; sometimes to save a floundering company project you may just have to assume the authority.

2) Diversity
Diversity is not just about ensuring different genders and cultures are represented; diversity includes an individuals' entire background.  So you have been an engineer and are most comfortable around other number crunchers; this will do nothing for you in an Organization Behaviors class.  Similarly a group of marketing communications specialists will have a miserable time in quantitative economics courses.  By diversifying your team, you will have access to a vast array of thought processes and problem solving methods; additionally these are the sorts of teams you will work in the real world.  Sure, this will cause some strife and challenge your assumptions (probably with good reason) but you are in school to learn, right?  A diverse team will provide fresh thinking and improved critical analysis of your group problems and solutions.

3) Distribution of Work
Doing all the work yourself is not the solution.  It may be successful for a class, but it can cost you your sanity, reputation, and learning opportunity.  Your sanity will suffer because, seriously, do you have THAT much time?  Your reputation as while your teammates might be happy with the grade (assuming you earn everyone a good grade) you will get a reputation as a poor team member.  Finally you will lose out on a learning opportunity because, in the real world, you WILL work on a dysfunctional team and this WILL help you learn to handle it.
This is a great time to evaluate team and individual strengths, to make both the optimal work assignments and to allow people to develop different areas of interest.  While there will be times to let the engineers crunch the numbers and the philosophy majors write the papers; most of the projects should allow for some diversification from stereotypes.  You, and your classmates, are in the MBA program to learn; make sure everyone has the opportunity to do so.

4) Communication and Collaboration
You will need to communicate with your teammates.  Seriously.  This is even more important if you are in an evening program (you will have some meetings while one of your team members is in India or another far off place such as Ohio).  Thankfully due to technology, there are plenty of ways to deal with this.  Google Docs, Windows Office Live, Skype, Zoho, AIM, email, and an array of other options all make this easy.  Like most everything else listed here, at the beginning of a project get together with your team to evaluate what technologies will be the best for the group and to avoid issues such as unfamiliarity with a tool or a corporate computer that prevents installation or use of a service.  After your system is set up, be sure to use it; you will just annoy everyone if you keep asking for updates when the latest group version of a presentation is being shared on Google Docs.

5) Management of Work
Everyone has been assigned their initial tasks; these tasks all need to have expectations assigned to them.  Expectations can include timeliness, quality, quantity, format, and an array of others.  Without this definition up front, people will have different ideas of acceptability (you might think your section needs to only be a draft whereas your teammates have tripled edited theirs) and deadlines (a paper due in a week might make you start working tonight while your partner waits until the night before) to effectively do their work.  Make sure your team defines these expectations upfront and develops a monitoring system (a spreadsheet with tasks, due dates, status tracking, and other expectations is a simple yet invaluable solution).

6) Recognition for Accomplishments
No, it will likely not help you get a better grade in this class.  So why do it?  It will help you get a better grade in your next class.  Everyone (almost) likes having someone say thank you for a well done job; think of it as positive reinforcement.  If your teammates feel their contributions are being recognized, the recognition will help their satisfaction and increase their contributions to the project.  Sometimes I would continue the recognition after the project, sending an email to the professor (CC your team member(s)) after the project turned in with a detailed and glowing review of your teammates’ contributions to the project.  Recognition will help build camaraderie and loyalty to the group.  Your teammates will want to work with you in future classes and will give you positive reviews when other students ask (and trust me, they will ask) if you are a good team member, all of which should help ensure you get the best possible team for the best possible project results.

While this is far from an exhaustive list on the keys to successful teams, hopefully it will help you succeed from the start with your MBA (and future career) teams.