Team Work Essay

What happened and why Seagate is unity of the largest digital content storage companies in the world and has short letter in about 15 countries around the world in Europe, Asia and the US (2011 Seagate Technology LLC). To create the ultimate group-building experience, e actually year Seagate brings 250 high-performing employees to Queenstown, near Lake Wakatipu in New Zealand. This event 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 company dog-tired a whopping sum of $9000 per person, and the goal of this exercise is to boost the employee morale, clog up office amity, and encourage police squad cast (Max, 2006). Seagates CEO Watkins wanted participants to experience the color that distinguishes an informal group from a high performing aggroup. He in like manner wants to strengthen his companys culture by reinforcing these norms and attitudes that encourage police squad fly the coop, perseverance and endurance. Why did I decide to write about this? I prepare been workplaceing for Seagate technology for about 10 years and have been witnessing this herculean effort of group building since 2001. I attended a scaled mountain version of Eco Seagate in early 2002, which was equally stiff and challenging but gave me a new way of thinking about police squad dynamics. The current form of Eco Seagate is a week- farsighted team upbuilding program, which includes a 10-mile trek, 12-mile bike arouse through mountain terrain, navigating about 3 miles in a kayak, rappelling down cliffs and more. The last day of the challenge combines these adventurous activities into one 25-mile (40 kilometers) race.On reach in Queenstown, the 250 Seagate employees were divided into 50 teams of five people each in most cases the team members had never met before and in some cases didnt even speak the same language but were expected to work together to fin ish the Eco-challenge. This event, which some call a companionable experiment, is fondle project of our CEO. Every year all 250 Eco Seagate participants learn a long lesson about the importance of teamwork. He envisions Eco Seagate as a way to set out down barriers, boost confidence and make company staffers unwrap team players. Some of you will learn about teamwork because you have a heavy(p) team, he says. Some of you will learn because your team is a disaster. (Max, 2006). Were in that respect outcomes substantiating or negative for the various parties in the situation? surely the outcome of this exercise is very positive for the company and Seagates staff. I would term this event as a mother of all team building exercise ever executed by similar sizing company in the Silicon Valley. One must trustworthyize that this is an enthronization towards Social capital (McShane and Von Glinow, pp. 236). After this event Seagate not only achieves better team dynamics deep down their employees but would also get a stronger bonding between company and the employees.Mentoring and coaching, especially on an informal basis, service people build networks they need to work across corporate boundaries (Gratton & Erickson, 2007). I see one negative side of this elaborate team-building exercise. Two meg dollar is a lot of money to be spent on a a few(prenominal) individuals in a large company that has 45,000 employees worldwide. in that location are number of other team building programs that can achieve the same results if not better at a such(prenominal) lower cost. For me the consequential 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 make everyone in my team to such an exercise so that more tat and team skills development can be achieved across the board. Based on my own experience team buil ding should be an ongoing routine and programs of this kind only have a short-term impact. Rather than one massive/expensive exercise, I would suggest having more frequent inexpensive programs that will encourage me to sustain my team over a long period of while.My education related to this experience Prior to going for Eco Seagate team building program, I had a feeling that I would work much better independently just like Scott commented. (Seagate Technology, 2007). My general feeling was that team work would be a burden to me and each person in the team would feel less responsible for contributing because others are present. initially I suspected that people tend to slack off, or loaf, when they work in a group more than they do when working only (McShane and Von Glinow, pp. 238).Later I concluded that I wouldnt be capable to complete that race by myself as the format of the race was very rigorous and everyone needs to perform multiple activities at the same time like trekin g, biking, navigating, map readings, searching for milestones and stretegic planning to overcome 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 languages or we viewed the situation differently.Our five-person team size played a very important role to increase the cohesiveness in branch four years of practice and familiarization phase (McShane & Von Glinow, pp. 242). Our revolution in knowledge and physical skills helped us to develop our team more effectively (McShane & Von Glinow, pp. 245). As a coach I acquire that I need to make sure that diversity is effectively managed in the team, because if it is not, it may lead to low cohesiveness. During four eld of the acclimatization session we organized several(prenominal)(prenominal) informal team meetings and started with learning each others strengths and weaknesses.During practice sessions we challenged each other ground on our weaknesses, which helped us to stretch 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 extremity we established several ground rules for the final day race and designate 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 climbing and rappelling down the cliff, I could overcome my idolise of heights 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 coming 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 capital of The Netherlands during my eight-hour layover at AMS Schiphol airport.Conclusion Though we didnt win the race, we successfully completed it about 50 minutes behind the first team that touched the finishing 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 fall through on commitments to others, actively listen to team members, take function for group successes or failures and give and accept the useful feedback that will help to improve the performance in next iteration.From the experiences at Eco Seagate, hopefully several Seagate managers are cultivated 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 t hem through positive expectations (McShane & Von Glinow, pp. 245-251). Works 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 cable Review , 85 (11), 100-109. Max, S. (2006, April 3). Seagates Morale-athon. Retrieved from Seagates Morale-athon http//www. businessweek. com/ cartridge clip/content/06_14/b3978085. htm * McShane, S. L. , & Von Glinow, M. A. (2010). Organizational 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. Harvard Business Review .