WEEK 7 readings – what are collaborative teams?

Before any readings was done, in my perspective collaborative teams would have each member understand their responsibilities, the team members have common target, performance goals and everyone takes one part of responsibility. I have heard a lot from my friends that they have met group members who never contribute anything, so they have to finish everything by themselves. I think it is very important to grasp the skill of working collaboratively. First of all, ‘a team is…a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.’ Each member engages through self-organization and through shared commitment to their goal. In order to evolve to high performance team trust, sharing, self- organization and mutual accountability.

Now, this part is where I am most curious, when a team get to divergence? There are ways to solve divergence, but I think is better to keep the original members will take less time. For example, if we take a member out, how can the rest of members absorb the person’s role and does this need a shift in power/ influence or control? In another way, if we change the team’s goal questions still emerge, such as: how can we best formulate our complementary skills around the new goal? Or is there any reason for the new compelling reason for the team to exist?

I believe everyone can understand that it is very difficult for all the individual characters to come together with our complementary skills, so I think this article is basically telling us to hold mutually accountable and do our best in order to let the group meet the performance goal.