Team Work Essay

What happened and why Seagate is one of the largest digital study storage companies in the world and has business in slightly 15 countries just more or less the world in Europe, Asia and the US (2011 Seagate Technology LLC). To create the ultimate squad-construction ingest, every year Seagate brings 250 high school-performing employees to Queenstown, near Lake Wakatipu in New Zealand. This solution tests all their physical and emotional boundaries of endurance (Max, 2006). This is a very popular program among Seagate employees and is known as Eco Seagate.The federation worn-out(a) a whopping heart of $9000 per person, and the goal of this exercise is to ascending the employee morale, live spotlight amity, and encourage concoursework (Max, 2006). Seagates CEO Watkins wanted grammatical constituenticipants to experience the intensity that distinguishes an informal sort from a high performing collection. He also wants to strengthen his companys culture by reinforcing these norms and attitudes that encourage police squad work, perseverance and endurance. wherefore did I decide to print most this? I shake up been working for Seagate engineering science for about 10 years and have been witnessing this potent effort of squad tropeing since 2001. I go to a scaled down version of Eco Seagate in early 2002, which was equally rigorous and challenging merely gave me a new way of thinking about police squad dynamics. The current form of Eco Seagate is a week- colossal team grammatical construction program, which includes a 10-mile trek, 12-mile bike ride through mountain terrain, navigating about 3 miles in a kayak, rappelling down cliffs and much. The exit day of the challenge combines these adventurous activities into one 25-mile (40 kilometers) race.On arrival in Queenstown, the 250 Seagate employees were divided into 50 teams of louver people for each one in most cases the team members had never met before and in most cases didnt even speak the very(prenominal) language moreover were expected to work together to finish the Eco-challenge. This resultant, which some call a social experiment, is pet control of our CEO. Every year all 250 Eco Seagate participants learn a lifelong lesson about the importance of teamwork. He envisions Eco Seagate as a way to break down barriers, boost confidence and make company staffers let out team players. nearly of you give learn about teamwork because you have a great team, he says. Some of you go away learn because your team is a disaster. (Max, 2006). Were there outcomes optimistic or interdict for the various parties in the position? Certainly the outcome of this exercise is very demonstrable for the company and Seagates staff. I would term this event as a mother of all team building exercise ever executed by similar size company in the atomic heel 14 Valley. One must rattlingize that this is an investment towards friendly capital (McShane and Von Glinow, pp. 23 6). After this event Seagate not altogether achieves better team dynamics within their employees but would also get a stronger bonding betwixt company and the employees.Mentoring and coaching, especially on an informal basis, process people build networks they need to work crossways corporate boundaries (Gratton & Erickson, 2007). I see one negative side of this elaborate team-building exercise. Two million dollar is a lot of money to be spent on a few individuals in a large company that has 45,000 employees worldwide. There be number of other team building programs that can achieve the same results if not better at a oft successions lower cost. For me the main issue with this program is that you are going on a team building exercise without your immediate workgroup team.What would you do differently? Why? As a manager, if I wanted to build a stronger team, I would take everyone in my team to such an exercise so that more viscidness and team skills development can be achi eved across the board. Based on my own experience team building should be an ongoing process and programs of this variant only have a short-term impact. alternatively than one massive/expensive exercise, I would bring up having more frequent low-cost programs that will encourage me to sustain my team over a long period of cadence.My nurture related to this experience forward to going for Eco Seagate team building program, I had a whim that I would work much better independently just like Scott commented. (Seagate Technology, 2007). My general incuring was that team work would be a meat to me and each person in the team would feel less responsible for contributing because others are present. ab initio I suspected that people tend to slake off, or loaf, when they work in a group more than they do when working alone (McShane and Von Glinow, pp. 238). ulterior I concluded that I wouldnt be able to complete that race by myself as the format of the race was very rigorous and everyone of necessity to perform multiple activities at the same time like treking, biking, navigating, map readings, searching for milestones and stretegic planning to spank the obstacles faced during the race. I started this exercise with low levels of cohesiveness with other participants. That may be because we work in different locations and functional areas in Seagate, speaks different primary coil languages or we viewed the situation differently.Our five-person team size compete a very important role to gro provideg the cohesiveness in first four long time of practice and familiarization phase (McShane & Von Glinow, pp. 242). Our diversity in friendship and physical skills helped us to develop our team more effectively (McShane & Von Glinow, pp. 245). As a Manager I knowing that I need to make real that diversity is effectively managed in the team, because if it is not, it may fly the coop to low cohesiveness. During four days of the acclimatization academic session w e organized some(prenominal) informal team meetings and started with learning each others strengths and weaknesses.During practice sessions we challenged each other based on our weaknesses, which helped us to demoralize ourselves beyond our normal physical capability. That was the first time I realized the power of Five C team member competency (McShane & Von Glinow, pp. 244). As part of our team building process we established several ground rules for the final day race and delegate team roles based on our strengths and willingness (McShane & Von Glinow, pp. 246-248). With the moral support of my team and several practice sessions of rock come up and rappelling down the cliff, I could overcome my fear of high and felt a little upbeat.When a group achieves noticeable and visible success, it contributes substantially to its feelings of cohesiveness and belongingness (McShane & Von Glinow, pp. 250). Since I know a few people who were feeler from California, I expanded my network by leverage them as brokers to connect the separate team clusters (Uzzi and Dunlap, pp. 56). Some of them actually became my social friends and one of them recently took me around for a quick sight-seeing tour of Amsterdam during my eight-hour stoppage at AMS Schiphol airport.Conclusion Though we didnt win the race, we successfully completed it about 50 proceedings behind the first team that touched the conclusion line. Overall experience was amazing and the skills that I learned at Eco Seagate are still contributing to my on-the-job effectiveness, including the ability to follow through on commitments to others, actively listen to team members, take responsibility for group successes or failures and give and accept the useful feedback that will help to improve the performance in adjacent iteration.From the experiences at Eco Seagate, hopefully several Seagate managers are well-bred and now contributing effectively to form a high performing team by building trust within teams, sharing and communicating goals among team members, empowering team members, and encouraging them through positive expectations (McShane & Von Glinow, pp. 245-251). deeds Cited * 2011 Seagate Technology LLC. (n. d. ). About Seagate. Retrieved from About Seagate http//www. seagate. com/www/en-us/about/ * Gratton, L. , & Erickson, T. J. (2007). 8 Ways to Build Collaborative Teams. Harvard concern Review , 85 (11), 100-109. Max, S. (2006, April 3). Seagates Morale-athon. Retrieved from Seagates Morale-athon http//www. businessweek. com/magazine/content/06_14/b3978085. htm * McShane, S. L. , & Von Glinow, M. A. (2010). organisational Behavior emerging knowledge and practice for the real world (5th ed. ). New York, NY McGraw-Hill/Irwin. * Seagate Technology. (2007, Sept 26). Eco Seagate 2007 The Bloggers (1, 2, 3). Retrieved from Eco Seagate 2007 The Bloggers (1, 2, 3) http//www. youtube. com/watch? v=4Gp7AYuZJN0 * Uzzi, B. , & Dunlap, S. (December, 2005). How to build your network. Ha rvard Business Review .