Currently, there are increasingly frequent requests of customers for effective solutions to problems or needs which do not have well defined at first the scope of work involved but it must be addressed in the shortest possible time, with optimum quality and a minimum budget. This type of request will in many cases require a very tight, progressive, concurrent, adaptive execution fully aligned with the expectations of these customers. Then, to adequately address this type of demand, organizations must have the necessary organizational structure, right tools, and the right personnel to allow the production of the needed information as requested, and an essential part of the right personnel is the team called upon to produce the necessary outputs to respond to the problems or the needs raised. The members of this team, in order to fulfill the functions that this kind of demand requires, besides being properly trained in the necessary hard technical skills (e.g., mastery of necessary technical theory, computer simulation software, 3D modeling, etc.), they should also be trained in the appropriate soft skills that allow them the following:
• Being very in tune with their colleagues and have full knowledge of the capabilities and limitations of the entire team.
• Being very open and communicative with each other, showing minimal dispersion in their performance, all oriented towards what is really important and all of them fully confident in the capacity of the others in the team.
• Being able to simultaneously execute different dependent activities with minimum rework (effective concurrency).
• Being able to achieve a collective understanding of the tasks in which they are involved.
• Being able to collectively encode, store and retrieve information.
• Being able to opportunely share and understand as a team the information and knowledge that enters and leaves the team.
• Being able to identify and remove the work blockers and bottlenecks to maintain the flow of results.
• Being able to identify and remove the work blockers and bottlenecks to maintain the flow of results.
In short, they should be trained to work aligned and synchronized as a single entity for the fulfillment of the established objectives, fully transparent, accountable and all committed to the intended purpose.
It should be noted that currently, most of the organizations concentrate the training efforts of their work teams in the strengthening of the hard technical skills, leaving aside the promotion of the soft skills that favor their integration as a team.
It should be noted that currently, most of the organizations concentrate the training efforts of their work teams in the strengthening of the hard technical skills, leaving aside the promotion of the soft skills that favor their integration as a team.
A team trained to work operating according to the characteristics described above can be identified as a fully cohesive work team, what indicates that they have enough group cognition, and as a result of this, it is a group that operates as if the members work Functionally Interlaced or rather Interwoven among themselves due to their very close cognitive linking, which would allow them to reach optimal levels of effectiveness and efficiency as a group.
1. Sharing Mental Models Capacity or Attitude to achieve the Team Mental Model:
A group that shares certain similarity in mental models, such as beliefs and ideas, will have similar understanding and expectations of the tasks that will be carried out, facilitating the processing and coordination of information that tends to minimize the meetings required and also facilitates the communication within the group even in stressful situations what improves their performance and cooperation leading them to a better quality of results in less time. The idea is the group shares a certain similarity in their mental models, essentially in their attitude because too much similarity will diminish their ability to generate ideas or solutions to events.
A group that shares certain similarities in mental models will allow in them the Team Mental Model assembly, which ensures that the entire group has a collective understanding of the state of each task and an understanding of how to achieve the stated objectives. R. Klimoski and S. Mohammed in their article "Team Mental Model: Construct or Metaphor?" (Journal of Management, Vol 20, Issue 2, Pages 403-437, 1994) define the Team Mental Model (TMM) as the shared understanding of the members of a group, so that the TMM preserves and handles all knowledge within the group as a single unit. The personnel within a TMM interpret the information in a similar way, sharing expectations about future events and promoting among them the natural leadership, not imposed, which in turn facilitates the coordination between the members anticipating the needs of other members with their corresponding allocation of resources when and where they are necessary.
2. Sharing the Transactive Memory of the Group or System (TMS):
The Transactive Memory of the Group or System (TMS) is a mechanism through which the groups collectively encode, store and retrieve knowledge. While TMM refers to shared knowledge and understanding, TMS refers to the distribution of knowledge within the group.
3. Sharing the acuity in the identification of the essential:
A group that acts in a similar way, assigning importance to what is really important and omits the superfluous, minimizes as a group the loss of time in shared activities that are not essential or that are not really necessary for the solutions they are trying. This consequently decreases the intellectual waste of the group, improving the simultaneous execution.
4. Sharing the propensity for interactive creativity:
A group that shares the propensity to interactive creativity among its members achieves effective identification among them during the execution of activities, which promotes the most effective search for solutions for the needs of the group to the specific demands of the client. These solutions progress interactively in a synchronized way with the contribution of all. In this scenario, the concurrent execution within the group is maximized by the interactivity among its members.
5. Sharing the propensity to work as a team:
When all the members of a group share the propensity to be part of a team, they agree to share responsibility for the results of this team and interact to fit each other, operating as a single entity with common objectives.
Once the team with the potential to work in a cohesive manner is assembled, its training starts in order to be able to work functionally interwoven. This training is based on the criteria that the way of working as a very cohesive group can be instilled and trained, and this is achieved by focusing the training of the group towards the Team Mental Model and the Transaction Memory System (see the article "Developing Team Cognition: A Role for Simulation" by R. Fernandez, S. Shah, E. Rosenman, S. Kozlowski, S. Parker, J. Grand. Simulation in Healthcare: Journal of the Society for Simulation in Healthcare, 12-2: 96-103, Apr 2017).
The training is carried out through Simulations and Strategies that promote the development of the group cognition and influence the team positively, offering them opportunities to work together and develop a shared understanding, identifying and reinforcing communication patterns, and also identify the knowledge network accessible to group members when necessary.
Some examples of Simulations and Strategies to develop the group cognition are listed below:
Simulations:
- Type of Simulation 1: Systematic.
Description: Event-based simulation to ensure that specific behaviors are obtained.
Example: Expose the group to unexpected events (e.g., change in delivery date) that will induce answers in key aspects, such as:
· Internal communication fluidity
· Internal identification of the leader.
· How knowledge is distributed within the group.
· Verification of concurrent capacity.
· Realignment capacity in the face of changes or new demands.
· Level of identification of the objectives.
· Identification of needs and the attention to these.
- Type of Simulation 2: Oriented to induce the exchange of information.
Description: Identification of relevant information, focused on quality, applicability, and importance instead of quantity.
Example:
· Perform the simulation without the leader, which will force all group members to share key information.
· Introduce pauses in the simulations at key points, to consult group members about how the exchange of information is contributing within the group.
· In the case of resistance to sharing information, an external participant demands information to force the exchange.
- Type of Simulation 3: Oriented to reinforce the processes and behaviors of the group, which positively influence their performance.
Description: Identification of knowledge and processes within the group.
Example:
· Introduce an unexpected change to induce the redefinition of priorities.
· Remove the leader in the middle of the simulation.
· Incorporate the group members in an outdated manner.
Strategies:
- Strategy 1: Crossed knowledge.
Description: Team members receive specific instructions about the roles and responsibilities of other group members.
- Strategy 2: Reflexivity.
Description: Groups are guided to reflect on progress towards their objectives, consider how they can adjust their focus, and plan how to implement new strategies.
- Strategy 3: Interaction within the group.
Description: Team members are trained in teamwork skills.
In summary, the fostering and training of work teams in the proper soft skills to carry out their activities as a closely interlaced team (functionally interwoven teams) would give organizations with key competitive advantages for the adequate and timely attention of the current demands in the execution of projects.
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