TED Talk: Teamwork and Its Evaluation Criteria

TED Talk is about a challenge that brought together students from different institutions. The participants, in this case, engaged in a competition to strategize, design and build a standing structure using a yard of string, a tape, and sticks of spaghetti. The primary aim is to test the efficiency of communication and the ability of the participants to showcase their creativity and innovation. The moderator disqualified many participants for failing to generate working ideas.

The video ends with a message that it is necessary to embrace collaboration, be great thinkers, and innovative when solving problems. It gives insights into the concepts covered in class, primarily the topic of teamwork and how it shapes performance. Building effective teams, in this perspective, involves several activities that enhance firm's productivity. The literature is in consensus that designing a team-based workforce is the basis of promoting business results and a firm's profitability (Fapohunda, 2013). It enables the employees to combine their efforts towards the achievement of organizational strategic goals and objectives. Managers foster teamwork by creating a work culture that empathizes collaboration in solving problems.

TED encourages people to use prototypes by involving team members in solving problems. This aspect interconnects to the topic of performance evaluation as learned in class. Leaders evaluate team performance by assessing an individual's ability to plan, coordinate, communicate, structure and meet organizational goals. The ability to communicate in leading teams is a critical skill that every individual should develop. Effective communication, in this case, enables team members to exchange ideas. According to Muszynska (2018), effective communication enhance creativity and innovative thinking through the effective exchange of ideas. The video further acknowledges teams succeed when the members have better relationships. Hence, the managers should focus on building relationships between individual members since it determines the level of cooperation and the achievement of goals. Besides the fact that collaboration requires strong communication skills, it is essential that the team, members develop a culture that embraces other people's points of view.

The Marshmallow challenge had useful evaluation criteria. We learned in the course work that the existence of teamwork evaluation criteria motivates the workers to showcase their skills. In this case, effective teamwork exists where an organization has a clear and well-commutated evaluation approach shared by all team members. The technique should be comprehensive, fair, and actionable. Also, it should have a measurable outcome and realistic deadlines since it affects the level of motivation among team members. A good team evaluation criteria leverage the strengths of individual members. It should also be fair in the distribution of assignments as a strategy to ensure that the managers make informed and the best decisions when rewarding performance.

The speaker in the Ted talk asserts that the recent graduates were the best pool of Marshmallow Challenge. These people are trained to develop their skills gradually and see problems as complicated issues. They did not spend their time in the challenge striving to be CEOs in Spaghetti Inc. This aspect relates to the topic of performance improvement as learned in class. Incentives in this perspective are necessary to motivate team members to improve their performance and productivity. Also, leaders, should have the requisite skills since it impacts on the performance of the team members.

The most relevant and essential concepts covered in the course are team building, performance improvement and the nature of proper group evaluation criteria. I learned that managers should nurture a culture of collaboration and cooperation in an organization since it shapes the attainment of both short-term and long-term goals and objectives.

References

Fapohunda, T. M. (2013). Towards effective team building in the workplace. International

Journal of Education and Research, 1(4), 1-12. Retrieved 16 April 2019 from, https://ijern.com/images/April-2013/23.pdf/url/

Muszynska, K. (2018). A concept for measuring the effectiveness of communication in project teams. Journal of Economics and Management, 33, 63-79. DOI:10.22367/jem.2018.33.04.