Team Leader or No Team Leader?
I guess the main focus this week has been
to consider the team dynamics around our project work for Module 3.
I felt disheartened by the section on
analyzing the ‘Big 5’ of teamwork – particularly the ‘Team Leader’ role, and
I’m surprised at how the notes are so predicated on the structure of teams with
a Team Leader. It was encouraging to read many of the other people in the tutor
group echoing the same sentiment – I think we were all pleasantly surprised by
our spontaneous self-organisation in Activity 15, and the MOOC has reinforced
the sense that H817 would be about new ways of utilizing Web 2.0 for learning
and collaboration.
I know the principles of the Big 5 are
tried and tested in traditional company structures, I just expected that H817
would try to let us discover new ways of doing things rather than advocating a
seemingly old team model. Maybe there are good reasons the module designers
have done this, and we will discover them along the way.
Meantime, we have the leeway to try
different approaches, there’s just a rather disquieting sense that, by trying
to work in a flatter structure, we are taking a risk.
I think it may also be worth having the
conversation in a bit more detail about quite why so many of us feel
uncomfortable having a Team Leader. In my case, it is simply that when I’m in
creative/learning mode and feel able to experiment, I don’t wish to be in a
team context that is in any way hierarchical, I want it to feel completely
collegiate, a partnership in exploration.
That doesn’t mean the team doesn’t need to
be highly-coordinated and well-organised, just that I would have thought a partnership
can have mechanisms for being highly-coordinated and well-organised without
needing to create hierarchical structures.
Anyway, we’ll experiment and see what
happens. Either way, we’ll learn.
Choice of Project
We had to choose an initial shared vision
of a project to work on – I think our team is quite well-aligned on this, and
the idea of doing something around immigrants/refugees and digital storytelling feels like
it could be very interesting and enjoyable, and also highly authentic.
Patch I am glad that the group as a whole and each team separately took the approach of wanting to try without a hierarchy, even in types of activities were subdivided according to skills and availabilities. There is a risk attached to all team formation, so I am glad with your views on this you decided to try being leaderless and using a collective approach. Knowing what other approaches have been defined and tried is always a good thing, if only because as a counterbalance they help in defining your own mode of work.
ReplyDeleteYour clear frank blogging here is documenting a journey that it will be good to look back on later. I'd love to read an update on this.
Paige