Crash course in team dynamics
Prospective MBA students put through their paces and taught the value of working as a group
YOU’VE just crash-landed in the middle of a desert in the south-west US. The pilot and co-pilot are dead.
You and your group have been able to salvage 15 items from the wreckage before everything caught fire.
What are the most important out of the torch, large pocket knife, map of the area, plastic raincoats, magnetic compass, first-aid kit, .45 calibre pistol, parachute, bottle of 1 000 salt tablets, litre of water for each of you, book entitled Edible Plants of the Desert, pair of sunglasses per person, 2 litres of vodka, overcoat and cosmetic mirror?
You could be excused if you thought that you were in the middle of an outdoor adventure experience – instead it’s a taster lecture for prospective MBA students.
They’ve got 10 minutes to do the assignment.
When they’re finished, Professor Kevin Money asks them to work in a group around the table.
Money is a psychologist by training. South African born and British bred he is the director of the John Madejski Centre for Reputation at Henley Business School at the University of Reading.
He has been in South Africa working with potential Henley Business School Africa clients on marketing and reputation management, his speciality.
Today, though, he’s running aspirant students through the kind of interactive learning they can expect if they sign up at the business school this year.
Today’s lesson is about team dynamics – the immersive way.
When they are finished, Money walks them through some concepts, basic kinds of decision making, consensus and compromise, the upsides and the downsides.
He uses the example of a teenager going out for the night. His mother wants him back at 10pm, the teen opens the bidding at 2am and eventually they each yield until they compromise on midnight.
But what if the boy asks why? His mother tells him she’s concerned for his safety if he stays out late.
The boy answers, saying he’ll keep his phone on throughout and be available for her, thereby answering her fears and ensuring his own needs are met.
“Often in teams, thinking about how we make decisions is as important as the decisions themselves,” he tells the class. “Far too often we presume how the person thinks.”
Voting, so beloved in democracies, is the best of all evils, yet in the US and the UK it has led to incredible conflict and polarisation.
“It’s great for doing things quickly,’ says Money, “not for explaining why you’re doing it.”
Money introduces the thesis of Meredith Belbin, one of Henley’s most famous academics, Management Teams, where eight specific roles have been identified.
He starts with the two types of leader: there’s the shaper; the chief executive type, and there’s the co-ordinator or enabler, who is likely to be the board chair. Often the two could find themselves in conflict.
Then there are the ideas people: the one who can be quite annoying coming up with ideas that are a little left field, but yet very powerful, and then there is the resource investigator. This is a person who can admit they don’t have a clue but can find others who do.
“Once you have leaders and ideas you have to do something with them,” says Money. This is where the implementer executes them or, in the case of the monitor/evaluator, shoots them down.
“At one level this person is annoying, but at another level is very useful to spot important things.”
Then there’s the team worker – very people-focused, the glue that holds the team together. The final role is the completer or finisher.
“They’re fantastic,” he “they’re the ones who deliver.”
The point behind this entire exercise is to find out what kind of team member each of the prospective students is, and what kind of team they would need to build around themselves.
“I remember someone saying as a prospective chief executive that he intended building a team around himself of exactly the same kind of people, but it’s the worst possible thing,” says Money.
“Perhaps the best thing I ever heard was someone admitting they weren’t an ideas person in a job that was all
says, about coming up with ideas, until that person said, ‘but I’m very good at spotting a good idea!’
“You don’t need to be a shaper to be a great chief executive,” he says, “you just need to know who you are and to ensure your team has the right people in it – that’s the Belbin theory.”
So, what was the most important item in the list?
It was the cosmetic mirror, according to the expert survivalist’s opinion, because the key thing is to be able to signal. The next important was the overcoat, to protect the body from sunburn and to prevent evaporation, then a litre of water per person, followed by a torch – not to see at night, but to signal at night – then a parachute, for shade and for signalling.
These were followed by the pocket knife, the plastic raincoat, the pistol – not to shoot, but to signal by noise when you start to dehydrate and can’t make as much sound – then a pair of sunglasses for everyone, the first aid kit, the compass, the map and the book on edible plants.
Finally, in a mad rush for last place, the vodka and the salt tablets for the simple reason that if you were in the desert for that length of time, eating salt would have killed you probably as fast as the vodka would have by dehydrating you. The vodka, though, might have dulled the pain.
The aspirant students marked their answers against the survivalist’s using negative marking. Most of them were in the high 60s or even 70s, but when they aggregated their marks as a team, they came down dramatically.
“The team score is around 40, it’s far lower than any individual,” notes Money, “the point is that the team decision can always be better than any individual, and as you get to know each other better, the results get even better, too.”
Ritchie is a media consultant and writer.