Demonstrate skills necessary to manage and work effectively within information organizations.
| Course: | LIS 650 Management of Libraries and Information Centers |
| Instructor: | Dr. Andrew Wertheimer |
| Semester Completed: | Spring 2020 |
| Assignment Description: | LIS 650 Syllabus |
| Artifact: | Final Written Portfolio |
Reflection
The Management Student Learning Outcome (SLO6) states that I will learn to “demonstrate skills necessary to manage and work effectively within information organizations”. To me, this means that I would learn how to work as both a team leader and part of a team and I believe that our team project demonstrates my proficiency in this. As a team, we decided to revitalize the Hui Dui organization website, which already existed but had not been used or updated since 2017. Hui Dui is the student government organization representing all UHM LIS students. The website had become dated and irrelevant so our group decided that we would focus on updating the content and improving its usability.
Group projects are often more time-consuming and require a different skill set than individual work, but working in a team is something that is essential to know how to do in the real world (Halfhill & Nielsen, 2007). Halfhill & Nielsen identify nine teamwork competencies in their study that they deemed to be important aspects of successful teamwork: agreeableness, communications, conflict resolution, conscientiousness, collaborative problem solving, extraversion, goal setting, meeting management, planning and task coordination. Some of these competencies I was already proficient in, like agreeableness, conflict resolution, and collaborative problem solving, and this project gave me the opportunity to improve upon the others, which I discuss below.
I had worked on teams previously and was used to communicating both online and face-to-face, but the COVID-19 pandemic happened near the midpoint of this project and we had to adapt to a whole new way of communicating with each other than we had been used to. Prior to the pandemic my team all sat near each other in class, so group meetings happened before and after class and during the break. We traded ideas and assigned tasks without the need for formal meetings. After everyone went into quarantine, we had to learn the best way for our team to communicate at a distance and how to continue to operate as a team. Staggers et al. (2008) discusses how operating as a team is more difficult in a virtual environment and differentiates between the concept of “team” and “group”. Group members work on their own, often without taking the needs and concerns of the other members into consideration whereas team members support each other and consider both individual and team goals while working together. Considering these two definitions, it is harder to be a team in a virtual environment because members may not develop the connections with each other that encourage team thinking rather than individual thinking. We were lucky that we had already started to think as a team, but I also noticed that due to the virtual environment we, myself included, were more of a group in the beginning than a team, and operated more independently than interdependently. This was evident in the feedback on the first couple of our assignments. After that, we all started making more of an effort to communicate more effectively with each other by meeting on Zoom more frequently and messaging each other more often. This ensured our submissions had a more cohesive voice.
Conscientiousness was something I did not have an issue with during this assignment. I was taking four classes this semester and I found myself prioritizing the work for this class because I did not want to let down my team. When we set a meeting time on Zoom, I always made sure I was on time and prepared, and I completed things relevant to the project that needed to be done without being asked.
I was surprised to see extroversion as a teamwork competency, especially as it applied to our team. As we are a group of librarians in training, and statistically librarians are not extroverted by nature. It is not a quality that typically comes naturally to any of us, but I have always considered myself to be a friendly introvert. I do not seek out the company of others but do enjoy interacting with other people when I need to. This project was no exception and I enjoyed interacting with my team, even in a Zoom environment. Zoom made it harder to have a group discussion but I always made sure to have my camera on and contribute as much as possible to the discussion.
Goal setting, meeting management, and planning and task coordination all seemed to go hand-in-hand in a virtual environment. I found that scheduling the next meeting and what we needed to accomplish between meetings to be very important, at least for my own personal organization. I always made sure we had another meeting time set before signing off and knew what we all needed to accomplish prior to that. I would send out a virtual meeting link right away to all members with the link for the next meeting. This way no one, especially me, would accidentally schedule another meeting at the same time and we all had the meeting link. Long-term goal setting is an area in which I lacked and did improve on as the semester progressed. There were so many parts to this project and so many deadlines that I had a difficult time keeping track of all of them and planning ahead. This is where the team really came into play because we would remind each other about upcoming deadlines, keeping the team as a whole on track.
An important management technique I learned is something we did concerning task coordination. We assigned project tasks based on personal strengths. We were revitalizing a website, which involved a lot of technical skills, but not all of the group members were particularly comfortable with the technology. I and another team member who was also comfortable with the technology took on the web design portions of the project while the other two team members focused more on content and writing. I enjoy web design and because I enjoyed it so much, I did not feel like I was working as hard as some of the others, even though I would spend hours trying to solve a particular problem. No one seemed to feel like they were stuck with the less enjoyable parts of the project because we were all playing to our strengths. I think that this was important to the success of our team project. Sorenson (2014) states that “people who use their strengths every day are six times more likely to be engaged on the job.” People cannot always do only what they enjoy but incorporating something they like into their assigned tasks can make the entire project more enjoyable overall and team members more amenable to doing less enjoyable tasks later.
Assessment is an important part of any project before it begins as well as after completion. Before beginning the project, we surveyed Hui Dui members to determine what they wanted and needed from the website, and we also asked the Faculty Advisor for her input. Their suggestions were all taken into account when designing the site. Afterwards, we used the website evaluation criteria created by W3C (University of Washington TRIO Training, 2011) as the standards for usability and design to measure our own site against. Now that the project is over, I wish we had been able to conduct a usability study and implement more changes. In the real world, assessment and improvements are constant. Changes to a site can be made long after it goes live but the time limit of this project prevented us from doing that. After putting so much work into it, it was also difficult to let it go. Now the Hui Dui Webmaster oversees editing and updating the site. While it is hard to see decisions and changes being made that I might do differently if I were still working on it, it is also rewarding to see the site being used when it was dormant for so long. The whole point of the project was to revive the website and its continued use now demonstrates our success.
References
Halfhill, T. R., & Nielsen, T. M. (2007). Quantifying the “Softer Side” of Management Education: An Example Using Teamwork Competencies. Journal of Management Education, 31(1), 64–80. https://doi.org/10.1177/1052562906287777
Sorenson, S. (2014, February 20). How Employees’ Strengths Make Your Company Stronger. Gallup Business Journal. https://news.gallup.com/businessjournal/167462/employees-strengths-company-stronger.aspx
Staggers, J., Garcia, S., & Nagelhout, E. (2008). Teamwork Through Team Building: Face-to-Face to Online. Business Communication Quarterly, 71(4), 472–487. https://doi.org/10.1177/1080569908325862
University of Washington TRIO Training. (2011). Website Assessment and Evaluation. Retrieved from http://depts.washington.edu/trio/trioquest/resources/web/assess.php
Mandi Hull 