Business

I am seeking admission in the Rutgers Graduate School and in this regard I am supposed to deliver my personal experience or what I learned from a failed team project.

The things that I am going to share are based on my personal experience which happened when we were handed over the assignment of collecting donations for a charitable organization. There were four people in our team and we were given a targeted amount which we had to collect.

Tasks were divided between the team members and all of the members were assigned with certain responsibilities which they needed to fulfill and report to the team leader.

First and foremost what I learned from my experience was that a project is very likely to fail if the team member does not have a clear job description. Each and every member of the team should be very clear of what their role is in the team, what their responsibilities are and what the team expects from them to do.  This was one problem that our team had, the roles were not properly divided and as a result there were more than one member doing the same job and the rest doing nothing.

After that communication between team members is very essential if the team members have a rift between themselves or there is some sort of grouping inside the team it should be eliminated because this would hurt the cause of the whole team. Open communication should be encouraged in teams every team member should feel free to contribute or share any idea that come to their mind. This also increases the trust among the team members and they will start to respect each other. In our case communication was there but it was very formal and for some reasons the members were reluctant of sharing their ideas with the other team members.

Free riders are a part of every team we also had a team member who are very little interested in working for the team or contributing towards the team and just wanted to enjoy the status of a team member without putting much effort. Similarly one of our team members was not much interested in this community supportive task and he was only doing it because it was the requirement of the program, so we really had to push him all the time to take work out of him.

Respect and trust are the very essentials of a team. The true spirit of a team can only be achieved if the team members would have trust in each other. Lack of acknowledging each others work was another factor which directed us towards failure. Because there was lack of communication team members very often celebrated each others small wins.

Unfortunately we couldnt do well with our project the desired results were not achieved but a lesson was learned as what to do and what not to do while working with a team.