Overview

• Will be covering organizational theories and lessons learned leading and managing people. I studied organization theory during my MBA and it really helped in my ability to interoperate with colleagues in different functionality and levels of the organization.

• I lead team of data scientists and data engineers. Effective leadership style depends on the circumstance, mix of people. A general rule of thumb is to hire and place competent team members establish strategy for implementing company mission and delight our companies. To enable and maintain high performance and throughput of the team, allocation of the right resources and coordination and interoperate with other teams to clear dependencies is paramount. Proper planning

• It is important to put people first, without compromising ability to achieve company's goals.

Resolving conflicts

• Understand the root cause

  • if task conflict it is an opportunity to come together to discuss and redistribute the work, organize and leverage the efforts
  • is it competition for resources
  • relational conflict - dysfunctional
    • communication, dependencies, disentangle
  • process conflict
    • team needs to understand roles and responsibilities and how to get things done together
    • lightweight process is preferred, find common process that works
  • Understand the people involved - concern for self or others
    • are they competitor, accommodator, avoider, compromiser or collaborator

• Possible Methods

  • Build a bridge, conflict could be due to lack of trust
    • Team building, achieve milestones together, celebrate accomplishments and wins
  • Get team to focus on superordinate goals (mission)
  • Emphasize commonalities
  • Try for a compromise
  • Third party to break tie
  • Provide resource
  • Use objective metrics
  • Improve communication, constructive comments, criticism
    • Move away from: reacting, arguing, rejecting, pushing and escalating
    • Listening, gentle about correcting mistakes
  • Appoint devil's advocate
  • Measurement of success - individual achievement, team success
  • Structural changes, change team

Group Health - build cohesiveness

• Enjoy group membership, participation, low absenteeism and turnover, accept group's goals.
  • information sharing
• Group formation stages
  • Forming - know each other and seek to establish purpose, ground rules, structure,
  • storming - resist to control - show hostility,
  • norming - team identity,
  • performing, adjourning
• Negative things to look out for
  • lose sight of goals and reality
  • side conversations, whispering, a few dominate discussions
  • discussion jumps around
  • discussion of real feelings/ideas after meeting
  • overly polite
  • conflict ignored or suppressed
  • quiet people ignored
  • coalition formation
  • work against organizational interests