Love it or hate it, teamwork is here to stay

CALGARY -- The first thing you learned in kindergarten could be the most important lesson you take from your MBA studies: Be nice and get along with the other children.

"The ability for students to function as part of a team is something that employers tell us they are looking for," says Dr. Gordon Fullerton, associate dean for masters programs at the Sobey School of Business at Saint Mary's University, Halifax.

Teamwork is one of the big three tenets of the MBA programs at the Haskayne School of Business at the University of Calgary, says Jim Dewald, associate dean of graduate programs. (The others are communication and critical-thinking skills.)

But the group dynamic is much more complex than simply going along with the majority view in the group.

"We don't encourage passive complacency," says Dr. Dewald, especially in the fields of ethics and corporate social responsibility.

If you feel the team is going in a direction that you are not comfortable with, you have to speak up, he says. Similarly, if you see a great opportunity to exploit, you should speak up. The challenge is to find a way of presenting your ideas in a manner that is compelling to other team members.

Some students don't like the idea that part of their grade depends on the work of others.

But business schools offer those students tools and training to deal with problem team-members.

Heather Johnson, a second-year MBA student at Haskayne, says: "We have all experienced difficulties with regards to working in teams, whether that's in school or at work. But the important thing about the teamwork opportunities in the MBA program is that it provides situations for students to encounter those issues in a safe setting, when there is support and feedback and tools made available."

Learning how to deal with these problems while at university prepares them for handling similar issues in the real world, says Ms. Johnson, who is a former teacher.

The Sobey school includes team-building exercises as part of orientation for new students and brings in consultants to help.

At Royal Roads University in Victoria, students can turn to someone like Don Caplan, an instructor in the MBA program and team coach for the faculty of management. He warns new students that they will face difficulties working in teams, and offers advice on how to avoid and deal with problems.

One of the most important tips is to get to know the other people on your team, and treat them like people, not like robots, he says.

"It is not frivolous to go out and have a beer or, if you don't drink, to go for lunch together, and to not talk about school," Prof. Caplan says.

Online students should work hard at developing relationships even though they may not see team members face to face. He suggests that online students talk to each other on the phone at least once a month. Online chat room conversations and e-mails aren't enough, he says - you need to hear the voice.

"Nobody is suggesting that you have to love each other, but you have to respect each other. That's the part that we have to really work on," he says.

The number of students who have truly irreconcilable problems with team members is negligible, he says. At any given time, 160 to 250 students are working on 30 to 35 teams at the school, and three or four individuals having severe problems in one year would be considered a high number.

Schools also limit the impact of group-based or team-based work so that a student's overall grade cannot be too damaged by the underperformance of others.

"In fairness, we contain the potential risk by maintaining that the courses generally will have no more than 30 per cent of the grade on a teamwork basis, so 70 per cent of it is going to be your individual performance. But 30 per cent is meaningful, you can't slough it off," says Dr. Dewald.

Ms. Johnson says she has gained new insights into teamwork and learned techniques to tackle any challenges since signing up for the MBA program.

"Learning to work within that group situation or setting, and realizing that the outcome is dependent on the team, is a reality. And I guess the group work in the program prepares you for that."

The more varied the viewpoints, particularly minority viewpoints, the more thorough and solid the solution to the problem will be, she says. "If you are working with people who think exactly like you, you end up with only one perspective."

Whether students like teamwork or not, they had better get used to it, because the business world demands it, says Jim Moir, a partner in the human capital consulting group of Deloitte Inc. in Toronto.

The real world is a more complex place for people in business than it used to be, and many MBA graduates will find themselves having to work with people from different backgrounds and different cultures.

"If the problems we are solving are more ambiguous, then it follows that traditional command-and-control sorts of management structures aren't going to be as appropriate," he says.

Dr. Dewald agrees that diverse business-leadership models are more numerous than they used to be.

"Twenty or 30 years ago, it was the take-no-prisoners, take charge and follow me to the promised land approach," he says. Now, many organizations favour "a much more humble, quiet, supportive, service-oriented leadership approach at the top and throughout the organization, so teams do ... play a much bigger part."

Allowing ideas to come from the ground up, instead of being imposed from the top down, can lead to great success, he says, citing the Pepsi challenge as an example. The taste-test promotion was the idea of one bottler in a Texas town. Pepsi ran with it, and the idea spread across the state and then around the world. "That allowed them to create a competitive advantage that they never had before."

Some of the greatest business successes come from leaders whose names you don't read in the press, says Prof. Caplan. They just know how to work with teams and how to trust them.

"I think people understand that the model of leadership is changing," he says. "You have to think of the hundreds of thousands of leaders in North American organizations who you don't hear of for every Bill Gates or Warren Buffet or even Jack Welch."