This week blog is to reflect on two main roles used to enhance team performance deemed as task-facilitating and relationship building. According to text reading these two roles are “difficult to do them equally, and most people contribute in on or the other due to people are either more focused on their task or building a relationship (p53).” During this blog we will look how I relate as a team-member in my job, my ability to engage me team, and steps I take to increase team cohesion and collaboration. (Whetten & Cameron, 2011)

Task-Facilitating Roles

The task-facilitating roles that I tend to use the most is direction giving, information seeking and giving, monitoring and process analysis. The most critical of those roles is monitoring and analysis. As a scheduler I am working with a program manager, technical leader, business manager, and over twenty engineers that are relying on my ability to monitor the programs schedule. I am expected to provide analysis of trends, and provide suggested solutions for any issues. I am constantly look for information and updates about task status, and sometimes it is not a quick answer. I try to not use the urgent or enforcement roles, only because I do not like when they are applied to me. I find this is only important when something is critical, such as loss of confidence from the customer, major delay that cannot be recovered, or life or death in nature. The culture at my work tends to over use the urgency role of task-facilitating, which makes me personally lose confidence in their ability to plan ahead and be proactive. I do participate in several enforcing task-facilitating roles by creating measurements for success. Each month I provide four different sets of metrics on schedule health and performance. These metrics take at least a full day to run, and they are great performance to list accountability at different levels.  There are times I don’t think my team can survive without a metric.

Summarizing and reality testing are areas that I can improve on as a team member. In team meetings I do summarize the discussion , but I am weak when other trump my meeting.  I feel this is lack of confidence and tends to occur when a new process or tool is established. I never really made the connection when people present ideas and I am analyzing their output that it was considered reality testing. I feel I do this automatically due be considered a subject matter expert in the topic.

 I do think you have to be very careful with all these in your approach. I am successful at engage the team as most of the work I do I am helping them achieve a result, whether it is directly asking the questions or helping another one the team. I have taken the approach to meet with organizational leaders and their teams, independently. I designed this intentionally due to the skill and aptitude levels of each of the teams are not equal. I do it this way to not intimidate the new employees who may not be as quick at reviewing their data as experienced employees. I want employees to feel they can express their challenges and be helped without being embarrassed in front of their peers.

Just recently my co-worker asked why all my teams turn their assignments in on time and he has to track all his down? One of my team members sent me an email thanking me always being nice and taking the time to come to her area, which is a good half mile walk, to help her learn about the schedule. The thank you email made me realize why my team members submit their data on time. I take the time to make them feel important and use the information giving role to help another person. My idea that is not in the list of task-facility roles but should be is respect. If you respect people’s time and make time for them when you are needed, the task facilitating roles fall into place, easily.  My weakness to the task-facilitating roles is the pressure of time. I find myself getting overwhelmed at times and feel personally I don’t enough time on certain efforts. These efforts tend to work themselves out, but I just don’t want the perception of my ability to be task facilitating to be jeopardized by perception.

Relationship-Building Roles

Relationship-building is probably my strong ability due to providing supporting, energizing and empathizing with situations. As a previous Control Account Manager (CAM), I often use that statement when working with my team of CAMs. I can use past experiences to provide future solutions. I have found this as a benefit to help assist in not electing a decision that may have a future negative impact. I am also able to identify decision impacts via metrics. Basically if person chooses to make a decision, I can identify the cause and effect of that decision, upfront.

I would like to think I am very good at providing support. An example as previous stated, I prefer to pick up my laptop and go to the work area of others. I enjoy doing this verses setting up a meeting. I also do other options of working with them via live meeting, where we can share computer screens back and forth, but never leave the desk. I tend to do whatever it takes to support the need of the team I support, as the effort is not about me. Although I am a scheduler, it is my role to help develop the success of the team and its members. Another example is when I started this job in August 2014, I was sitting in a new meeting with lots of managers from different skill sets. I am thinking I am just another person who is to talk when spoken to. My manager asks me what I thought about the idea they were proposing. I stated that it was all good and the decision really did not impact the schedules. After a couple months in the role, it was stated this meeting is the leaders of the organization and it’s our job to support teams as the leader. This was a very harmonizing approach, and I also realized my role was more critical than I thought.

Role Balancing

I do respect the book content identifying that the task-facilitating and relationship-building roles are hard to do at the same time. I kind of disagree as I feel if you have respect and compassion you can integrate the two together.  I think you can be supporting while giving directions, seeking information, and information giving.  I also think you can summarize the tasks roles by applying empathy and harmonizing the team and it’s all in the approach used. If I had to choose which is more critical I would say the relationship-building is important to ensure tasks are completed, accurately and on-time. I ensure team cohesion and teamwork is levied because we get more done as a team and can help others learn along the way. To restate, I think it is important to treat people how I would want to be treated, respect for them and myself, and lastly be organized.

Work cited:
Whetten, D.A., & Cameron, K.S. (2011). Developing Management Skills (8th ed).
Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall