Team Player

Part A:
In the International College of Integrative Medicine, our teams are our board committees, which sometimes include members at large. We have around ten committees that handle our meeting planning, website, corporate culture, long range planning, financial matters, political concerns, etc. Each team has a chairperson who is supposed to set agendas, follow through, and give reports back to the board. One of our challenges is that as committees we are geographically spread out so that we can never meet face to face. Most of our communication is by email, which makes it easy for members of the team not to participate. Members and chairpersons of the teams are unpaid volunteers and do not hold their committee work as a high priority in their lives, therefore progress is often slow. As executive director I end up taking on most of the initiative of each team in order for something to happen. Sometimes I wonder if I am stepping in too much and not delegating enough. It is true that with active, vibrant committees that come from a working board, our organization could achieve results at a pace far exceeding our current activity. However, we need to be realistic about our limited paid staff resources and our need for volunteer labor, which slows down our potential growth.
Recently, I met with the president of the board about ways to motivate our teams and to encourage our chairpersons to take a more active role as leaders. He came up with a job description to let our team leaders know what responsibilities the organization expects from them. If passed, this document will be added to our policies and procedures, as a way of reminding team leaders (or warning them) what the job entails. The paragraph is as follows:
Congratulations on taking the responsibility of a committee chair. Your initial responsibilities should be accomplished as soon as possible. Determine if you need more help. Please recruit additional committee members or ask the President for more help if needed. Set goals for your committee to accomplish for one year. Set up a schedule of meetings in person and/or by conference call to accomplish your goals. Make those meetings happen. Set benchmarks to assess whether your goals have been met. Take initiative for projects, be creative. Keep the President and Executive Director appraised of your work. Get approval when needed.
Three weeks prior to in-person Board of Director meetings, you should prepare a written report for the Board, which will also be included in the minutes for that meeting.

To pass the test of Hackman’s conditions I would analyze ICIM’s teams as follows:
1) I believe that our teams are “real” in that they do have the authority to make real decisions, and sometimes take important action. Their recommendations are almost always approved by the rest of the board.
2) Each of our committees has a compelling direction in that they deal with a specific topic. Obviously some of the committee themes are not as compelling to their volunteers as they need to be for true motivation. Perhaps the long-range planning committee could provide a more compelling direction as they give us a vision for the future.
3) As for an enabling team structure, I think the lack of face-to-face contact really impinges upon this. It is hard to gel long distance, or even to bounce ideas off each other for maximum use of our collective experience.
4) Committees have full organizational support.
5) I would like to play more of a role of team coach than as team initiator in the future. It is my job to follow through and see that the ideas generated by the committees are realized, but also my job to monitor and inspire the committees to act in the most effective manner possible, while having some distance, since I am not a board member. Our board president can also serve this function if he puts more conscious effort into it, which I think he is starting to do.

Part B:
During my college years I had the benefit of being part of an incredible team effort. This experience molded my entire understanding and ideal of what a team can be, and unfortunately no work situations have ever lived up to it. The team was the University of Waterloo Peace Club. Our task was to protest the university-sanctioned recruitment of workers for military contractors on campus.
For an entire year, members of the small peace club had been meeting trying with all our hearts to come up with a mission statement, a vision for our purpose. In the past, the group had not been active so we were starting from scratch. We had long discussions and arguments about issues with structure and priorities, outreach and interfaith dialogue. Despite all of this, the group achieved almost no action, sponsored no events and just became more frustrated and cynical.
One meeting a young man came to the group. He had not been part of the peace club before, but he was clearly a leader on campus and a very charismatic guy. He had a vision, a vision to shut down the cozy relationship that our university had with the military industrial complex, and stop the recruitment for military workers through the co-op employment program, which was part of many students’ schooling. It was a connection we had never discussed. It was clearly a strong peace issue, and it affected an institution we were part of. It was something we could call our own.
I don’t remember how everything happened, but in a matter of only about two weeks, part of the group who was not in favor of radical action quietly left the peace club and started its own Christian mission group. Others from campus started flocking to the peace club, including a more diverse collection of new faces we had never seen before. It was like the word was getting out and magic was starting to happen.
In a very short time, we had planned a major protest in front of the administrative building during the recruitment sessions, leafleted all the co-op students with brochures we designed making the connection between war and their jobs, and illegally hung a huge banner about our cause across a busy intersection. The feeling in the group was absolutely exhilarating. Relationships blossomed. Our vision which we had argued about for a year now seemed crystal clear. We were all focused on what was important to us. Each of us was fully engaged and using our various talents toward our common cause. Though the young man who had planted the seed of the idea stayed with the group, he did not take on a leader role, but allowed collaboration to truly fill out the body of his plan.
In the next year, we planned and implemented other actions and campaigns, but we never lost the energy that that original clear direction had fueled us with. We were truly autonomous; we had organizational support from many faculty members and were allowed freedom of expression from the administration; our team structure fell into place spontaneously and effortlessly; and we had inspiration in the person of one guy who just wanted to make a difference.