Cross Functional Team and trust building

A cross-functional team’s members must by definition represent several organizational roles and bring complementary abilities to the table in order to work toward a common objective (Bishop, 1999). Nevertheless, it is crucial that proper team management be carried out in order to identify potential obstacles, how to make sure that each individual feels like a vital member of the team, and how to ensure that trust is developed among them. This is true even though it is expected that the 20-year-old veteran, college graduate, and wage employee will contribute to the overall goal.

In terms of potential challenges, it’s critical to strike a balance between the team’s functional and psychological responsibilities. (Winsborough & Chamorro-Premuzic, 2017) indicate that functional roles occur based on an individual’s formal position and their expertise while psychological roles occur due to individual personalities. To this end, the 20-year-old and wage employee may bring higher functional and psychological roles to the team and thus overlook the possibilities that the graduate may offer towards achieving the goal. To counter this obstacle, an evaluation of the suitability and thereafter the selection of each team member should be shared with the entire team. This will create an avenue where both expertise and personalities will be respected within the team.

The issue of ensuring each individual feels like a vital member of the team can be solved by ensuring proper management of attention. (Thomas, 2017) indicates that this can be achieved by ensuring that the team operates within an environment that values focus whilst relying on appropriate communicating channels as well as monitoring results from each individual member’s input. This will allow for all members to be devoted to the team’s assignment and as such, have tangible evidence as concerns input. In addition, appropriate communication will not only assign tasks but also ensure that no individual member’s personality hinders the ideas of other individuals (Winsborough & Chamorro-Premuzic, 2017).

Lastly, in order to build trust, it is essential that the relationship-building role is established. This entails allowing the team to know each other through coaching sessions that will establish rules governing unspoken feelings. In addition, monitoring of the team should be done as a means of identifying and improving areas of communication and respect among the members as a way of boosting cooperation and trust.

References

Bishop, S. K. (1999). Cross-Functional Project Teams in Functionally Aligned Organization. Project Management Journal, 6-12. Retrieved from https://www.pmi.org/learning/library/cross-functional-project-teams-functionally-aligned-organizations-5318

Thomas, M. (2017, February 2017). Your Team’s Time Management Problem Might Be a Focus Problem. Harvard Business Review.

Winsborough, D., & Chamorro-Premuzic, T. (2017, January 25). Great Teams Are About Personalities, Not Just Skills. Harvard Business Review.