Graduate Development Programme Work Based Assignment 1 M3.11 Building Team M3.

30 Understanding the communication process in workplace

Sushil Goswami SAP ID: 01060136 Graduate Mechanical Engineer Tata Steel UK Port Talbot

Trust & Confidentiality

How do you develop & maintain trust at work and why confidentiality is important in building and maintaining trust at work? Trust is important to any organisations performance. In work teams with high trust environments, they work with more effectiveness and the people work harder, better whilst feeling more positive about their workplace. When trust exists in a work team or organisation, the cost of doing business is less and everything else is easier and more comfortable to achieve. The process of building & maintaining trust at work can be summarised in following ways:

1. Establish and maintain integrity & confidentiality Integrity & confidentiality are
the foundation of trust in any work team/organisation. In simple words, this means keeping promises & being truthful/honest to your colleagues. At workplace, work colleagues may sometime wish to seek support/advice on issues that they may be facing owing to reasons at home or/and work. In such instances, it is very important to maintain the confidentiality of the conversations that you may have with your work colleague. It may be embarrassing or humiliating for them for if such information becomes public. Confidentiality lays the foundation of open and honest communication in the workplace with the assurance that information will not be shared with those not intended. This goes for the information shared & accessed at workplace relating to the organisation.

2. Treating all colleagues as equal partners Trust is established when even the
newest colleague, part-timer or the lowest paid employee feels important and part of the team. Being appreciative towards the actions & achievements of the colleagues is crucial to making them feel as an integral part of the team. This means valuing inputs from all colleagues and encouraging them at all levels to share their ideas to improve business. This also includes listening with an open mind even if you dont ultimately choose to follow a suggestion made by a colleague. This kind of behaviour is equally reciprocated and improves the trust amongst the team.

3. Pushing forward on shared, rather than personal goals Trust is formed when the
team has a common goal and they feel that everyone is pulling together to accomplish a shared vision/goal, rather than a series of personal agendas. When teams start achieving goals, the colleagues trust one another.

Team Development
Describe the difference between a group & team using examples from your workplace to illustrate this difference. Briefly describe the stages of an established model of information using the examples from your experience to illustrate the process. According to Katzenbach and Smith, A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, set of performance goals, a common approach, for which they hold themselves mutually accountable. A group is just a collection of people with something in common, such as being in the same place or having a shared place. According to Tuckman, there are four key stages that a team goes through, namely:

Forming

Mourning

Performing Norming

Storming

There is also an additional/final stage termed as Mourning when the team eventually breaks up or a team member/members leaves the team. Forming Stage: 1. People are put together. 2. People are unclear about the goal/goals of the team their roles within it. 3. Important to discuss the purpose of the team & individual roles & responsibilities. For example, when I joined the company as a graduate mechanical engineer, I was allocated to Asset Improvement Team for 12 months long placement by HR. At this stage, I was unaware of the purpose of the team and more importantly my role within it. When I joined the team, the line manager explained the objective of the team and my responsibilities towards it. Storming Stage: 1. Team members test each other & leader. 2. People try to establish themselves by being loud, organising others etc.

3. Important for leader to be assertive & listen to all concerns whilst keeping everyone focussed. For example, the first risk assessment I attended in relation to the project that I am currently working on exhibited the aforementioned characteristics of storming stage in early days. Team members were unclear about the objective & structure of the risk assessment, often leading to loud arguments and little progress during early days of RA. Norming stage: 1. People start to understand each others skills & personalities. 2. Certain ground rules are established. 3. People start to feel confident. 4. Open challenges take over from loud arguments. During the Norming stage of the team for R.A., the team members established some ground rule with regards to challenging others about their views and opinions. The team members started to recognise & appreciate the skills & personalities of each other. Performing stage: 1. Team starts to perform. 2. Team members start to help & support each other & understand each other a lot better. 3. Team members play to the strengths of their colleagues within the team. The R.A. team during the performing stage started to produce a valid & well-assessed document. The common observation was that team members understood each other a lot better and respected each others opinion while recognising strengths of their colleagues. We felt free to come with new ideas & ways of doing things. Mourning stage: 1. This happens when a team eventually breaks up often due to fulfilment of the team goal. 2. Sense of loss among the team members. After the 3 days long course at Ashorne Hill, the learning group that I was part of, has often expressed a feeling of missing the opportunity afforded to us via this training course which allowed us to sit together and contribute to each others personal & professional development.

Team Roles
Explain the benefits of knowing your team members preferred roles (if possible, you should illustrate this by briefly describing the Belbin Roles of a few your team members). People working in any team-based environment often have two roles: 1. Functional Role 2. Team role While functional role is attributed to ones academic & vocational skills, team role is a tendency to behave, contribute and interrelate with others in a particular way- Dr Meredith Belbin. The Belbin team role profile indicates how an individual will behaves and operates within a team and concerns their tendency to behave, contribute and interrelate with others in a particular way. The nine team roles identified by Belbin are as follows: 1. Action-oriented Roles Shaper, Implementer, and Completer Finisher. 2. People-oriented Roles Co-ordinator, Team Worker and Resource Investigator. 3. Cerebral Roles Plant, Monitor Evaluator and Specialist. Now, the question arises What can be gained by identifying peoples preferred team roles? Knowing peoples preferred team roles makes it easier to work effectively with people when you are given some expectations of their tendencies and preferences. As per Belbins research, a balanced team - one with the greatest chance of developing fully effective working arrangement - would contain a balance of these team roles. Besides, every team goes through a phase of activities during which some team roles are better able to contribute than others. The information provided by identifying team roles is useful at many levels: 1. Self-awareness: Knowledge of ones own team role/roles allow one a unique insight into the perceptions that one holds about himself/herself. It is only by knowing ourselves that we have any chance of achieving our full potential & improving ourselves. 2. Tool for effective teams: As mentioned before, team members have two roles within the team: Functional role & Team role. While functional role is concerned with getting the job done, Team role is concerned with the job is done. Knowledge of team members Team roles allows one to draw upon the strengths of each other while managing weaknesses at the same time. 3. Tool for effective team/staff selection: Traditionally, staff selection is based upon functional roles usually defined by an individuals eligibility for the job. However, research shows that a very weak correlation between the eligibility for the job and actual job performance. Selecting team members for a specific job based upon not only functional role but also incorporating Team roles profiles is a proven method of selecting teams with higher performances. Team roles help in deciding the suitability of a potential team member for a particular team. The same applies for staff selection. 4. Tool for career planning: When making career decisions, it is imperative for one to consider his/her natural talents and behavioural tendencies. Belbin profiling enables one to become more self-aware in discovering ones strongest & weakest

team roles. This allows one to work upon his/her blind spots paving way for making better career planning & choices. To illustrate this using an example, a Monitor Evaluator (ME) is someone who is best suited to analyse problems and evaluate ideas and suggestions. He/she would be very good at weighing problems/ideas/suggestions in terms of their pros and cons. Generally, a ME is an unemotional, prudent and serious minded individual who, to many outsiders, may appear as dry, boring or even over-critical. Characteristics like hard-headedness, sound judgement, discretion and clear thinking are MEs strengths but often suffer from weaknesses like lack of imagination and ability to motivate others. They often appear to lack warmth and feelings for others and may be sometimes perceived as hypercritical. In my team, Mr. David Jones (name changed) is a Process Safety Engineer. He is very methodical and likes to follow a certain procedure for any task he does. Whilst working upon the Risk Assessment, I observed that he was usually slow in making decision preferring to think things over. At few occasions, some team members appeared to be a bit frustrated with the pace of RA meeting. However, as the RA was one of the most important parts of the project, D. Jones preferred to get every minute detail right than pacing up the meeting for the sake of just doing it. As an individual he seems to lack the spirit to inspire & motivate others, lacking warmth & feeling for others. I find his demeanour best suited for analysing and evaluating problems and ideas.