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Team building issues: Ineffective interactions degrade
scarce resource allocation decisions
As
a senior consultant at Arthur D. Little, a global management
consulting company, I was confronted in the early 1990s with a recurrent difficult
problem. I had to come to an agreement with my fellow consulting project leaders
to plan the staffing of the potential projects we had in the Brussels office
sales pipeline.
We were growing, so resources were regularly scarce and we needed
mutual
learning to arrive at creative staffing solutions. My yearly bonus was
tied to my real sales so I felt threatened when, unable to secure a key
resource(s), I was risking to postpone the start of a project and lose
the sale to competition.
So
I was trying to distil informations
about the progress and resource needs of my sales to control
unilaterally the whole
process: bypassing some informations, exaggerating some other, showing
little empathy for the others... My interactions were then not very
effective!
This
contagious behavior - initiated by me or by an other participant - was
leading the group to poor conversations, low quality decisions and a
very limited engagement of most participants around the "apparently agreed" decisions.
So
within a few days, one of us would come with a new piece of
information, attempting to justify that one of his sales had become
more important, to re-open the whole discussion and try to change the
previous decisions in his favor ...
I can still feel this bitter feeling after some of these poor
conversations.
Serge Pegoff
Key
lessons
Return
from a team building issues story
to
team building stories
Return from a team building issues story
to team building results
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