Discussion:
As usual, submit all of your answers to the questions for both of this week's learning activities in the same initial posting, use proper formatting with headings and APA style, include citations and references, make the necessary number of well thought out follow-up responses, and so on. The best way to go about adding your initial postings and follow-up responses is to first type them into a MS Word document and then paste them into the textboxes in LEO - there should NOT be any attachments for the learning activities unless stated otherwise since they would take too long for students to open and professors would not have time to open and read so many either. Make sure to pay special attention to any wording, spelling, punctuation, formatting, and similar types of issues. Feel free to have someone else look your work for any ways to improve it (the actual ideas expressed still have to be your own though) or contact the UMUC Effective Writing Center to see how you can improve your writing abilities as much as possible since you pay for this service anyway and surveys have indicated that one of the main things that employers want to see from graduates is that they have excellent professional business writing skills.
Learning Activity #1: Examples of Teamwork
Describe teams that you have been part of and how effective and efficient they may or may not have been (if you have not had a great deal of experience working on teams you can describe teamwork in an organization that you have read about).
• Use terminology from this week's chapter to describe what types of teams they were (e.g., manager-led, self-led, cross-functional, and virtual), how cohesive they were, how motivated or frustrated members were, your skills and the role you played, whether there were any blocking roles, and characterize the type of communication that occurred in terms of whether it was more formal or informal, had any barriers, and so on.
• What could have been done to improve the teams and workplace communication?
Learning Activity #2: Teamwork and Communication in a New Venture
There is a popular framework called the Timmons Model that is used to evaluate the viability of a business venture based on how well three important components fit together - they include evaluating the Opportunity (what the true market potential is, how much of a customer demand there might be, and how strong the competition is), Resources (financial, physical, technological, and others), and Team(the founders, owners, managers, key employees, board of advisors/directors, special contractors, and so on). This isn't an entrepreneurship or small business management class so we won't look at all of these here (some people mentioned a number of these already in the context of their SWOT analysis last time) but:
• With regard to the organization that you previously indicated in a previous learning activity that you might like to start, what types people would you need to have as part of the team when the venture starts up?
• How important would teamwork and communication be and what would you do to create a well-functioning team environment?