ILead recently hosted its full-day Leadership Lab on Optimizing Teams. The workshop provided a foundation for thinking about individual and team values, leadership and working styles within a team, understanding and resolving conflict, and creating actionable change in team behaviours.
Many students came away with a new understanding of the benefits of tailoring team norms to the values of individual team members and creating working relationships that embrace conflict to achieve high quality outcomes. Here are a couple of those insights from our student attendees:
Twesh Upadhyaya (EngSci 1T9)
Today I had the pleasure of attending ILead’s workshop on Optimizing Teams. I found the event well-organized and run by excellent instructors. While I was familiar with much of the material, it was refreshing and illuminating to hear it presented again from a different viewpoint; highlighting some new subtleties. In particular, I liked how conflict was discussed. It was framed as a need unmet by a teammate, as opposed to a disagreement. By framing it in this way, we were able to see that conflict is a symptom of some deeper misalignment of values and feelings. This understanding helps pave the way to a satisfactory resolution.
Haitong Xu (MechE 2T0)
Before the workshop, I simply viewed building a team as just making the members work effectively together. But through the workshop, I realized that it is also about building relationships. In the sessions on values and leadership styles, my view on conflict also changed. I realized that conflict is not avoidable and actually can be beneficial for team development. People have different values which leads to different needs and different people work differently in a team. Therefore, as a leader of a team I should make sure all other members are aware of each other’s value and provide opportunities for all leadership styles to contribute. And as a member of a team, I should make sure that my need or my workstyle is realized by others so that I am actually engaged in the team. Having a shared value can help unite the team and trust-based conflict helps the members know each other better.