Forming highly effective teams that include individuals with diverse skills, exp

Question

Forming highly effective teams that include individuals with diverse skills, experience and ability is a challenge for managers, yet the results are typically good. However, this approach requires a sound understanding of group dynamics and the ability to recognize people’s strengths, what they bring to the project and the maturity to overlook their perceived weaknesses. Why is this an “easy to say, hard to do” management practice? Why do people from different technical fields often have a hard time getting along? How important to team success is friendship among coworkers?

Explanation / Answer

We expect that educated people are easier to manage, they mingle well with others and diverse people will have lesser conflict since they will be focused on building relationships. In reality, although educated, they have a self-ego, they are in the group to prove themselves as leaders and have their own goal on priority. Educated people are difficult to reason with, everybody has a leader in them. They are here to build good relationship but the relationship is not of equal priority but of boss and subordinate relationship. Moreover in a diverse group people with some kind of similarities ,form a sub-team. These people have, perhaps more experience than the managers. Hence managing a diverse team is a very hard practice.

People from different technical field have different level of expertise and may have a unique strength in the team. In that case he might consider himself superior to others and would prefer to lead the team. In this quest of gaining the leadership position, there is always a clash of some kind or other.

Friendship among coworkers will lead to easy sharing of ideas, single focus i.e. organizational success, and a good repository of knowledge that can be effectively utilized to meet the goal of the group thus leading to team success.

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