Neal Hartman is a Senior Lecturer in Managerial Communication at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His teaching of management communication and intercultural communication emphasizes working in teams, conflict and conflict resolution, leadership, and cross-cultural communication. We feel quite honored to attend his lecture about interpersonal attitude survey and the Belbin model of team roles.
In order to give students a thorough understanding ofvarious communication styles between individuals, Professor Hartman conducted an interpersonal attitude survey in class to help students realize which communication styles they are. There are five communication styles in total, which are analyst, innovator, producer and diplomat. Prof. Hartman then introduced the advantages and disadvantages of each style, and reminded students of the importance of team cooperation.
In the second part of the lecture, Prof. Hartman introduced the Belbin model of team roles. As a routine, he asked the whole class to fulfill a questionnaire to notice the typical role each student playing in team works. Every team role has its own contribution as well as possible weaknesses, thus different team formations are needed to deal with different team tasks and different stages of the tasks.
But “In individuals madness is a rarity, but in groups … it is the rule”,Prof. Hartman quoted Nietzsche’s word to end the lecture, strongly suggesting people always remember the unreliability of group decisions. And this is another interesting topic to discuss about after the lecture.
(By 2013 IMBA ,Mingwei LI )
