I am going to write about my internship experience in Dow Chemical again, since this is the most recent team experience I can recall.
The summer internship program at Dow includes both an individual project where you learn the specifics of your assigned department, and also a group project where summer interns across departments work together for a business case competition. Summer interns are divided into teams to participate in the case competition and are asked to present their case and proposal to a panel of key leaders from different departments at the end of the internship.
The scenario is something like this：
Dow leadership team is currently reviewing Dow businesses and would like to further invest in one of them. Each team should choose one Dow business that you think has the largest growth potential and new market opportunities. Based on that choice, each group should develop a proposal with action plan to present to the board members. After the presentation, the board members will select one business to invest in and the team represents that business will receive the “Best Team Performance” award.
This competition was announced at the first day of internship during orientation. There were 33 summer interns in total, 14 Research & Development (14 boys and 2 girls), 6 Manufacturing & Engineering, 8 Marketing & Sales, 3 Environment Health Safety & Sustainability, 1 HR, and 1 Supply Chain. IS (information system) interns in the apprentice program (6-month part time internship) also participates in the competition with summer interns, about 10. At that time, everyone is new and people haven’t known each other very well yet. They did not assign us randomly into teams but asked us to form our own group based on a few restrictions provided (e.g have to include at least 2 non-R&D members, at least 1 undergrad, 1 master, 1 PhD, etc.). Based on the rules, the teams formed are pretty diversified with interns from different functions and backgrounds.
We had almost no progress for the first 2 weeks. Seeing other groups already started their work, I decided to initiate and organize discussions and meetings. Purely because that I feel anxious if things are not organized and planned ahead. I thought we should have a plan and assign tasks to teammates so that everyone could start their part early. After a few discussion meetings, one of our teammate proposed me to be the leader, coordinating everybody and assigning tasks, everyone agreed, so then I became the leader.
After a few discussions, we settled the business unit we are going to present and made an outline. We decided what to include and also figured out what we need to work on. We roughly divided our work into 4 parts: policy and macro background, market analysis, R&D technical difficulties, and action plan. We had 8 people in our team, 3 of them from R&D, 1 from Marketing, 1 from HR, 2 from IS, and 1 from ME (remote teammate). Our team structure does not strictly fit in any of the 5 team configurations discussed in Chap5 of B&D, it’s more like a combination of the Dual Authority model and the All-Channel Network model. The technical part was assigned to the 3 R&D teammates, and one of them was pretty proactive, so he is seen as the leader for the R&D sub-team. The other parts are divided and assigned to the remaining 5 team members. The R&D leader represents the 3 R&D teammates and they work separately from others in our team. All other people are more like in an All-Channel Network, we do our own part and discusses with all others in the team to see how to improve and fine tune our direction toward our goals. Another work I was doing was coordinating everyone’s time for discussion meetings, setting up plan and timelines for our project, and making sure everyone is finishing their work on time, and finally integrating everyone’s work for the final presentation.
Actually, having a middle-leader for the R&D team is very effective. I don’t understand much about the technical part and having a middle-leader in charge for that part saves me a lot of time, and they know better than me on how to divide their work and assign tasks. All I have to do is to make sure that everyone is on the right track, adjust their direction of someone is moving away from our goal. I found that people from different functions approaches the same problem differently, and thinks differently. R&D people are very down to earth, and strives for superior results, but they sometimes tend to ignore the market need. Meanwhile, marketing people are very ambitious and market-driven, but they tend to ignore the technical difficulties. Therefore, coordinating different perspectives and persuading different groups to compromise toward our common goal was a difficult task for me. Of course, we as a group figured this out together, not myself. I believe I’m just the one making sure our direction points toward our goal, but the difficulties and decisions, are solved and made by the whole team together. The All-Channel Network helped us to communicate freely and make decisions together with information from everyone.
We are a team with manageable size and a right mix of expertise. We have 8 people in our team coming from different departments with diversified knowledge and expertise. We also managed to define our purpose and translate the common goal into specific and measureable performance goals at the beginning of the project, by creating detailed plans and deadlines. Discussions and detailed plans also enabled us to commit to working relationships. Everyone is clear on their task, and what they need to do, and also agrees on other people’s role, because we made these decisions together as a team. And finally, we have always been working and collaborating closely with team members every step we move forward, so we do hold ourselves collectively accountable. During the Q&A session for the final presentation, we reacted as a team, everyone tried their best to answer the questions asked by the judging panel, even if the question is not related to their assigned part, just to contribute to the team success.
Through this experience, I did think a lot about what a good team leader and good teammate means. For a good leader, I think the most important is to be always clear on the team goal, coordinate everyone, and motivate them to perform their best toward the goal. I’ve also learned that being a leader means taking responsibility. Usually if your team succeed, the team receives the honor. But if your team fail, you’ll need to take the responsibility. Because no one will think that it’s because your team members do not contribute or they are being irresponsible, they’ll just assume that you are not a good leader, and you did not lead the team well. Since you are the leader, you are responsible for the poor performance. For a good teammate, I believe being responsible and someone that others could rely on would be the most important characteristic. Not always insisting on one’s own idea is also important, because things may seem different when being seen on an individual level or a team level. Individuals will need to compromise from time to time to maximize the team performance.
What encourages behaviors of a good team member? I believe team culture and motivation. Good behaviors from other people in the team as well as the team leader will reinforce and encourage team member’s good behavior, and this is a virtuous cycle. Therefore, a good team culture is of critical importance. Motivation is equally important. Good behavior is not out of nowhere, it needs motivation. It could be the compensation, the honor of winning, the recognition, or if the team experience provides them help for their future, etc. From my experience, I find it hard to motivate team members. Some team members are always supportive and reliable. There are also some members that are not interested in the group projects at all, they prioritize their other work on top of the group project. Some feel that this group project is not helpful to them because they are not going to do anything related to business in the future, and it is not included in their performance review so they do not care that much. Although they still do some of the work, they do not put much effort into the group project. If more motivation is created, they will be able to produce much better work. For example, if group presentation is included in the individual performance review, or if there is a teamwork evaluation survey conducted, people will be much more motivated to collaborate and contribute to the team.
Despite all the problems, our team preformed pretty well in the end. We did not win the best team performance award, but we were rated as the second best among the 6 teams. We figured out our own way of working things out and coordinating such a diversified team, with even remote team members that work in the factory site in a different city. Even if we did not win, I would still see my team to some extent successful.
This was a pretty involved post that I hope you can unpack for me some. I'm going to being with something you discussed near the end - the motivation of the team members. I think it would be help here to understand the overall motivation for becoming an intern at Dow, which perhaps you've discussed elsewhere but it is not in this post.
ReplyDeleteLet's say that motivation is related to ultimately find a job with Dow. If that's right, then there is a question about the relationship between the competition you described and whether Dow identifies the person as a good potential hire. I did not see that connection in this post. You treated the competition as if it was an end in itself. And perhaps it ways. But you didn't explain why that would be true.
Because your team had people with different expertise the handling of the assignment problem may have been pretty straightforward. But I wonder if other members of the team agreed that all the tasks were actually necessary. Your discussion of the R&D orientation versus the marketing orientation was very interesting. (A specific example of the conflict there would have illustrated the matter even better.) Did those people get along or was there tension between them.
You also said that you got the job of leader in a default way, nobody else initiated the discussion. It would be good to understand why that was true. Were the others shy about it? Busy with other things? If you were not the most senior in the group, which I gather you weren't, then being the leader in this situation without otherwise being appointed leader would create some obvious challenges. The more senior members of the group might challenge it if they didn't like what you were suggesting. Did that ever happen?
Also, I didn't understand something about the competition itself. There must still be some judgment in deciding the best investment opportunity. The research itself might produce some obvious candidates, but choosing among them might be more art then science. So what was being evaluated, the choice itself or the methodology for making the choice? That wasn't clear from the discussion.
Actually, I was not the leader at the beginning. They asked each team to select a leader one the first day of orientation. Since everyone didn’t know each other very well at that time, we just drew lots to decide who to be the leader, pretty random...
DeleteOur leader wasn’t that interested in the case competition and did not put much effort to coordinate team members to prepare for the case. And our group leader is not a summer intern (working on a full time basis), he is in the part time internship program, and comes to work for only 3 days a week. After 2 weeks of no progress, I decided to organize everyone to work on the case, I was just concerned that if we don’t start soon we will have too much work when approaching the deadline. And after a few meetings my groupmates proposed me to take the lead, I guess everyone agreed because they saw that I’m well organized. I am not the most senior one in the group, however no one in our group is an expert in marketing cases. The R&D people are more senior, but they have no experiences in business. And they are busy working on their research projects. Other people in our group, although they are very interested in the case, they are not motivated to be the leader and coordinate everything. They might think coordinating cost them more time, and being the leader means more responsibility… just my guess. There was no conflict during the process, everything went on pretty smoothly. And since we made most of our decisions together, instead of me directly assigning tasks, everyone agreed on the division of the tasks.
For the decision on the investment opportunity, yes there are some clear criteria. They focus more on the business sense and logic flow of the whole presentation and action plan, instead of digging into all the details and the research part. This competition did not relate to the final performance review of interns, so they did not see this as a way of evaluating potential hire. I guess it’s too difficult to evaluate each individual, since a lot of the work is behind the scene, and only a few group members will represent the group to present.