Have you ever thought about what your typical role when you are working with teams? Are you inclined to control and organize activities of a team, making best use of the resource available, or to give shape and form to team’s activities, or to translate general concepts and plans into a practical working brief and to carry out that brief in a systematic fashion? You might explore the answers of these questions if you had Sloan lecture delivered by Professor Neal Hartman to the IMBA students today.
In a team work context, people tend to behave in a particular way. Introducing a model called “The Belbin Model” saying there are 8 distinct roles with which people often tend to prefer 2 to 3, such as Co-coordinator, shaper, or implementer, Professor Hartman helped the students to identify the roles that we normally play as we are working with the other people, explaining the Pros. and Cons. for each one of the 8 roles.
The key takeaways we have taken from Professor Hartman are not only of self understanding concerning our roles in a group working, but also of group thinking. To illustrate the character of group reasoning, the MIT Professor gave us a core concept named “group thinking”, meaning that group pressure for conformity would deter individual in the group from unusual, minority, or unpopular views.
Class discussion, stimulation, and self-reflection are always the elements of Professor Hartman’s lecture. We all impressed by this teaching way and by the methods by which he brings out the academic concepts. Students can always know more about the leadership and communication, most importantly we can know more about ourselves in Professor Hartman’s lecture.
Written by 2014 IMBA Xin LI
