The most important lessons I took away from this week were, to my surprise, from my classes. Not that I didn't expect to learn in class, but I didn't expect for that learning to take place in my Organizational Behavior (OB) class. I don't know if I'm learning anything new, per se, but rather that the class is bringing to my attention things I always knew were important but never placed enough emphasis on.

In a team, team members like to be acknowledged internally to the team, especially in times of conflict. I always thought team members wanted outside acknowledgement, from management, customers, etc., since this is a lot of what drives me personally. But team members really just want their peers within the team to acknowledge their contribution. Good to know.

In a group situation, anything you can do to take the pressure off individual team members is goodness. I personally perform better under pressure and deadlines than I do when I don't have group pressure or a deadline; but most team members perform better if you take the heat off. Obvious, but I didn't see it clearly before.

Take time to diagnose what's going wrong. There are many problems and many solutions in teams. If something's going wrong, you have to figure out what the cause of the problems is before you try to implement a solution. Just like a doctor doesn't randomly hand you some drugs, you can't assume any random solution will solve a team's problems -- although people often make this mistake.

Nothing tangible happens in the first half of a meeting. Research shows that groups become productive and produce deliverables in the second half of meetings! So don't feel frustrated -- acknowledge this, and set clear deadlines and shorter deadlines for the end of meetings. This will reduce the amount of waste time.

Separate content and process. Define process for working together first; once you get into the content it's hard to define process.

If you hold the minority opinion in a group, and can get just one ally on your side, you are much more likely to convince the group of your opinion.


On the non-academic side of things... I had a whole day without classes today! So I worked on my company. I suspect that's not the typical way MBA students spend their downtime, but it's the way I choose to spend mine! The weather is beautiful -- not a drop of rain in days (when's the last time someone said that in Seattle?).

Off to wine-tasting in Napa this weekend, and then looking into how to work on my golf game this fall. It's a fine balance between school, work, and play, but a great one.