The Efficiency of A Team.

Today I want to tell you something of the team spirit that we learn at the MBA course at Lagos Business School.

Strong team spirit is beneficial for creativity and innovation because it encourages employees to share ideas and make them grow. Feeling good in your team contributes to the feeling of belonging to the company. even in team sports like football, once a strategy is passed across, each member of the team becomes a star in so far as the team is winning. Individuality is relegated to the background.

At the beginning of one’s career, it is easier to depend on the team to sharpen some rough edges of your career. At that level, you know little, and the fear of failure propels your humility. Therefore, the eagerness to compliment your knowledge comes naturally, especially if your company’s process encourages the method of staff grouping.

In my company I found that this is a useful tool. Before I joined the company, I met a system where each cost controller manages one project at a time. I found that quite inefficient and expensive. This method basically entails employing new staff each time a new project is onboarded into the system, with a tendency to have excess staff when there is a gloat in projects. To solve this, I introduced the grouping system, where the staff are grouped to work in several projects, with a team lead for each group. Each member of this team has equal responsibility towards the projects and the absence of any number of staff do not affect the smooth operations of those projects. In trying to solve a cost problem, I inadvertently solved far more challenges for the company. The strengths of each member contribute to the success of the group and the weakness of each is taken care of by the collective strength of the team.

However, executive positions generally isolate you with and makes one think that the entire decision must be taken by you. Ofcourse this does not apply to senior management meetings where decisions are collegial. It applies more to executives who head sections or departments in an organisation. The more one approaches the peak, the lonelier it gets. Companies must be deliberate in putting mechanisms that reminds executives that better judgements and decisions are enhanced by team strengths and contributions.

Therefore, It was refreshing to see that the Lagos Business School groups the MBA students into diverse teams and attaches a lot of weight to the group works. I have taken time to study the groups and understood that certain criteria were employed by the school in the groupings. They include professional qualifications, employment positions, age, and experience. This diversity has been helpful in all the courses. In our group, we have three accounting inclined professionals who take the lead in our Corporate Financial Accounting group meetings and case studies. We have some numerically inclined professionals who can break down the numbers at the Analysis of Business Problems and Data Analytics. We have business strategists who interpret the cases of APB and help everyone understand. Ofcourse there are many other skills like presentation and the rest.

The important thing to note is that in the school, executives are made to transfer their knowledge to the other members of their group who are less inclined in certain courses, same way it should be in an organisation. It has been an interesting session thus far. The diversity also comes with their challenges. In not a few occasions there have been divergence of opinions on a particular problem. The level of debates when these happen results in better learning opportunities and decisions. Another advantage this comes with is that every opinion is backed up with concrete basis for such view. And this entails deep and extensive study and the ability to defend one’s position.

This course is taking us back to the basics. My takeaway is basically to seek more opinions from my subordinates and leverage on their strength to make better decisions for the organization.

#memba12 #lbs