Week5 Chapter5 The Team Message

Srategy5
Reinforce the team message constantly “we are one-we live or die together”

I think that Japanese compulsory education well regards an importance of teamwork. Therefore, we mostly have commonsense that “…the challenges faced by most organization can only be overcome through unified effort”.(p70) This is probably because Japanese society puts importance of cooperating with others when people get together ir get in a group to work. However, I learned from the readings that teamwork can easily fail if people cannot share same goal/message constantly. The example of a failure of Everest climbing team showed an importance to share value emotionally and physically. A lack of shared identity, resulted disconnection and isolation among people as climber said “We were a team in  name only…” (p72)

I personally experienced a successful achievement that containing shared identity. I joined freshman summer program to study at SOAS in summer holidays. That year was the first time for ICU to send a group of students to participate SOAS summer program. Therefore, we had a task to complete program successfully as well as to develop our interests. At first, we did not know each other much, and there were 10 students which is fewer than other groups participating summer program. Because it was first time, there were some struggles over our stay in London. However, our leader did great job to make sure we shared common value of an importance to complete program successfully throughout the program by emphasizing strong message. We also bought same jerseys as a shared identity to reinforce our teamwork. So making sure to share goal and value are crucial for Shackleton and his people to complete journey as the situation was between live and death.

It was also interesting for me to find out that it is important to include members by sharing information and discussing problems. This will make people to feel they are heard and counted as a team. However, it is essential for leader to show his/her role as a leader and to make important decision by himself at the end. Shackleton’s great strategy of unifying team members can be applied in our daily lives as an example of company in the chapter showed. Sharing information and having discussion will maintain people’s morale and improve motivation.