Effective Team Working in Organisations

Introduction - 2 Characteristics of effective team working...2 Team reflection...2 Team presentation...3 PPD activities...4 Conclusion...5 Bibliography...6 Introduction In this report I will discuss the most important characteristics of effective team working in organisations, I will also reflect upon how my team used these team characteristics to enhance team performance. In addition to that I will also discuss the important features of effective presentation, and reflect my experience of engaging on presentation project. Lastly I will reflect upon my PPD1 activities and coursework during the academic year, and the skills I developed. Characteristic of effective Team Work Team work can deliver shared strength for any organization.Effective teams help organisations to become more creative and make a pleasant and open atmosphere.Cameron (2009) states that the most important characteristics of effective team work are Communication skills, managing tasks and managing processes. Good communication skills: it is very important that team members to communicate in order to achieve common goals and keep up a strong relationships at all levels. Involving in a group work requires good communication skills. If the communication between team members is not to the required level messages could not be transferred efficiently within a team, and therefore targets could not be met. McComb et al (2012) suggested that effective communication enhance the overall performance of a team. Managing tasks: this gives the team clear objectives and it allows them to monitor their progress towards their actions weather the team determine their action needs to be engaged or not. Group members have to arrange and prioritise their tasks. In this respect leaders or managers are responsible to monitor overall team performance and take curative measure when problem occurred. Managing process: This part is vital for team work. It requires that teams have to dedicate the team’s goal and encourage contributing to the tasks. Once goals and objectives are set out it is imperative to provide support to team members and encourage them to cooperate towards their common goal. Cooperation is a backbone of team work, which can trigger and activate members together towards the common organisational objective. Providing support and incentives for team members could enhance cooperation within a team (Sliwka, 2001). Team work Reflection Reflecting upon my group presentation I feel that my group did not communicate enough; one of the reasons that broke our communication was that some of my group member were participating on other course presentation, and they did not have a time to get involve. I also feel that my team did not have clear common goals because there was no communication. Since I was nominated to be the leader of the team, I tried to improve my leadership skill through the project. To do so I implemented servant leadership style than transactional leadership style, where I take the initiation to help my team members and lead them by example. The servant leadership style I used helped other team members to get started and the overall team communication improved instantly. Politis (2013) argued that servant leadership style has a substantial effect on improving team performance that the traditional authoritarian leadership style. In the future group works I will make sure that each member of my team will get involve and give an opportunity to explain their opinions. I will also plan ahead to take strategic measurements when unexpected things happen. I will make sure that things will not get pushed out of the way and affect the overall team performance. In addition to this I will make sure that my teammates share their ideas, thoughts and feelings, in order to become successful as a group. One of the things I learned from other groups was the way they allocated tasks. Each member did fair share of the work. I also learned that it is essential that teams needs to cooperate and support each other towards their common goal. It is also imperative to improve our time management so that tasks can be completed before deadlines. Good Presentation Cameron (2009) suggested that most important features of effective presentation include good preparation in advance, clear structure and clear objectives. Use of images, diagrams and other visual aids also represent an effective presentation. Good presentations do not just happen; it has to be prepared in advance, rehearsed, and then delivered clearly so that audiences can understand the message. The one who is delivering should learn the presentation skills such as positive body language, use of toned voice, and eye contact with the audiences. The presenter who believed they are natural presenters might fail sometimes. This ascertains that repeated practice is vital to improve presentation skill. Successful presentation depends on adequate preparation. It is good to illustrating the main points; the best way to illustrate the main objective of the presentation is to useimages, charts, and graphs in order to highlight points. Humans are naturally attracted to visual things and can understand information more than listening or reading. I feel my Presentation was not that bad, although we all did not rehearse before the actual presentation. I believe that we managed to provide a good presentation because we were improvising during the presentation. I suppose that we could do better if we rehearse the presentation in advance. One of the challenges we faced on the presentation was that we were not confident enough, especially I was nervous and that affected our performance. Finally we managed to address our arguments to the audiences. I was proud of our effort because we overcome our fear and keep awake our audience until the end of the presentation. The feedback from the audience was inspirational; the only critics were that we missed to reference the presentation. In the future presentation I will encourage my group to rehearse before the actual presentation in order to overcome nervousness and improve our confident. In addition to this I will make sure that I reference my work in order to back up my ideas and make my presentation solid. My opinion maybe important but it is advisable to support the argument made. Looking back on my fellow peer’s presentation, I learned that body language is very important way of attracting the audience. Making eye contact also helps to create instant communication with the audience. Human beings always communicate using body language even though they are not expressing or using words. The way people walk or stand, or even look, send countless messages. During our presentation, body language was one of the effective presentation factors my team failed to make use of it. According to Graduate Career tips (2012) “Presentation is not just about blowing your audience away with a brilliantly worded presentation. It is also about the delivery and how you present it yourself and exhibit body language signals. Find a balanced combination between body language, your tone of voice and great content to engage your audience.” PPD Activities As my time in Greenwich University has gone on, PPD activities helped me to develop the following essential skills that are applicable in today’s competitive business world.

• Group work skills: I used to think that group work is waste of time because most of my group works members do not put a lot of efforts and I used to encourage members to engage in to the work, but PPD helped me to understand that group work is a vital skill for business and academic success. I also learned that working in a team improves efficiency. The other benefit of working in a team is that it improves communication skill, cooperation, and collaboration to come up with different ideas and solution to problem at hand.
• Develop my writing skills: PPD helped me to improve my writing skills substantially. Since English is not my first language, I was interested to develop my writing skill at university. Engaging on PPD coursework gave me an opportunity to develop my writing skill highly. Furthermore, it helped me to improve my research skills and my referencing abilities.

I would suggest that PPD should give more time promoting group works. This will help new student to boost their confident. I also think that new students should get more help on their English, because year after year there are more international students whose first language is not English. Since IT is the backbone of the contemporary business world, I would like to suggest that PPD should involve IT sessions to teach future students basic computer skills. I uploaded evidence of attending Big Picture seminar in my Employability passport page. On the big picture seminar I have learned about some measurement of economic growth. Based on annual percentage of national output economic measurement, china and India are growing faster than most of western countries.as a business student the seminar gave me an idea how the economic crisis occurred in 2007 affected individual businesses and impose large amount of unemployment in the western countries. I also uploaded evidence of my unrelated Part time employment letter. As a retail security officer I have learned how retail business work. As student working in retail supermarket will increase my probabilities of attaining a graduate job after completion of my degree in the retail sector. I already spoke to my store manager to give me an opportunity to work in Tesco’s finance department during my second year. He told me that he graduated from university before 4 years ago and he said that he was a former Tesco employee; he advised me that I can follow his rout to improve my employability after graduation. In addition to this I uploaded evidence of attending Resource event in Excel. During the event I attended few presentations. It was good experience and most of the presentations covered number of subjects for the circular economy, such as advanced manufacturing processes, adaptive and smart manufacturing systems. As Business with finance student, the event was beneficial because I would like to learn the principle of the upcycling industrial products. Conclusion During the second term I have learned about ways of efficient use of water in household and organisational uses. During my research I found out that many people are suffering from shortage water. Since 70% of the world is covered with water, unsustainable use of water is the cause of water shortage around the globe. We also learned that how unsustainable use of resources could cause environmental pollution and global warming. The emission of carbon is the main cause of global warming, and most industrialised countries are responsible for that. I also learned about how to develop a CV in a way that I can sell myself to the employers. Effective team working enhance business success through setting clear objectives, empowering team members, and creating harmonized working environment. Effective team share ideas, knowledge and experience for the good of the organisation. Communication is the basic skills to perform well within a team. If a team lacks communication skills the targeted goals could not be met as required, thus developing communication skills is mandatory to be productive in a team work. Bibliography Cameron, S (2009). Business Student’s Handbook: team working and leadership. 5th edition, Essex, Pearson, P.237 Cameron, S (2009). Business Student’s Handbook: Presentation to others. 5th edition, Essex, Pearson, p.264 Graduate Career tips (2012). Body language: importance to great presentation. Available from: https://graduatecareertips.co.uk/2011/06/body-language-great-presentations/ / [Accessed March 15, 2014] McComb et al (2012). The five change ways of team communication: business communication. 54(5) p.10-13 Politis, J (20013). The relationship between team performance: Authentic and servant leadership. Leadership and Government p.237 Sliwka, D (2001) “Never change a winning team”- Team- Incentives and implicit cooperation. Schalenbach Business Review (SBR). P. 53(4)

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