Creating and Managing Effective Teams
Bill Parker
Axia College
Organizational Business/MGT245
Tiffany Stamper
August 12, 2007

Creating and Managing Effective Teams
Creating and managing effective teams in today’s work environment is much different than it was just a short time ago. With each generation of American workers come new ideas, rules, and methodologies that must be considered when developing an effective team. Some of the newer ideas may have been foreign to managers even ten years ago. An example of this is that many companies today are becoming more socially responsible. A recent article in Incentive states, “Social responsibility, it seems, is the new signing bonus” (Flanagan, p4, 2006). Rarely are managers given a …show more content…

The next issue that was created by the simulation was that the team perceived that Amanita was pushing her own ideas and agenda not working well with the team. I explained to the group, in a team meeting the need to balance recognition of Amanita’s ideas with the team concept of maintaining creativity. I also reminded Amanita that, although her ideas were excellent, they should not stifle the creativity of the rest of the team and that all ideas should be taken into account.
Later in the simulation I used the devil’s advocate approach to move the team away from the group think mentality that had been growing. This technique was effective in keeping the team open-minded to new ideas. The constructive criticism and challenging feedback was an effective way to get the group out of group thinking and made the team better prepared for the upcoming presentation.
My last challenge was to remind the team of our common purpose, coming up with exciting and creative ideas for the project. The team had been very successful at setting up best practices but, as is the case with many projects, they became stagnant when it came to the creative needs of the project. This may have also occurred because it was near the half-way point of the project where stagnation is nothing out of the ordinary. To fix this problem I used training and a team building exercise, combined with