Blog Post 3: Teams

The most successful team that I have been on in the past would be my pollinating crew at Pioneer. I worked pollinating as a summer job because it paid very well and it looked better on a resume than babysitting. There were three incredibly simple tasks. The first was chute bagging. At the beginning of every season, the highest chute on the corn plant had to be covered with a small plastic bag so that it didn't absorb any pollen that we didn't want it to. The second was just called bagging. For this one, we covered the pollen tassels at the top of the corn plant once they had started to shed. The last was called crossing. For this one we took the tassel bag from one corn plant, removed the chute bag from another (or the same one) and stapled the tassel bag over the chute, so that only the desired pollen was used to fertilize that one corn plant. The only possible complexity was the pattern of which tassel bag was used to pollinate which chute. Sometimes we would perform cross pollinations using two different species of corn and sometimes we would perform self pollinations with a corn plant fertilizing itself.

There were many fields that we had to get done every day, so everyone employed would split up into teams with one boss called a crew leader, who was usually a full time employee or an intern at Pioneer. We would get instructions from the researchers each day at the main facility, then we would head out to the fields to perform them. In this sense the organization would be considered a simple hierarchy. However, the pollinating organization as a whole had many flaws, so I would like to discuss my individual pollinating group as an isolated organization. In this sense we would be considered a One Boss organization, which Bollman suggests, is most efficient for our simple tasks.

The individual pollinating group that I was a part of was a perfect example of Katzenbach and Smith's definition of a high functioning team. Our crew leader, Sam, would organize us all individually. If we were going to be missing work, we would give her a three day notice and she would make sure to recruit a replacement. She always knew how much of our field we needed to have done by lunch break to finish by the end of the day. This showed self management. She also knew our strengths and weaknesses. Because chute bagging and tassel bagging could be done simultaneously, she would assign each individual the task that they were fastest at. This showed that we could assign jobs to members. Sam also designated what she called a runner to resupply us with bags, staples and water when we ran low. She would also call for breaks on hotter days when she thought they were necessary and would double check any rows that she though may not have been done well. This shows that she made production or service related decisions. Finally, she would always take responsibility for any slacking in quality. There was a day when she found that three consecutive rows had been done improperly around 3:30. We were scheduled to get off of work at 4, but instead, we went back and attended the usual end of day meeting, clocked out and then returned to redo the field. This shows that she took action to remedy problems.

Comments

  1. You delve into pollinating without asking whether a reader would know what you are talking about. So the piece would have benefitted from a paragraph to explain the company and the the work it does. In the process you might also say something about why Mother Nature needs an assist here.

    You then say that the company as a whole had some inefficiencies to it but didn't elaborate on that, instead preferring to describe the small work group that you were part of. The question is why your work group was more effective than others. You don't really shed light on this, other than that you had a good manager. Did the other groups have managers who were less effective? Why would that be?

    Getting back to what I said in the first paragraph, there seem to be many fields of corn around town that are not attended to the way your group attended to the corn. What is the advantage, come harvest, of having bagged the corn in the way you describe? In other words, while I'm sure your manager could tell whether the bagging was done correctly, after the fact (at the time of harvest) could others tell whether the work had been well done or not? That seems to be a big part of the story.

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    1. I apologize, I can see the confusion now. I began the post assuming that everyone knew what pioneer does, since they are such a big company around here. Pioneer is an agricultural research company that specializes in genetic engineering of different crops. In this case, we are helping to make sure that the crops are bred in a very specific way to select for specific traits.

      I preferred not to involve the entire company, because it becomes much more complicated with multiple people overseeing the pollinating crews. There were two specific pollinating supervisors who were full time employees managing the fields, multiple researchers who would sometimes oversee their specific fields and then the director himself would sometimes show up to observe and even once helped out when we were shorthanded (very memorable day). As far as each individual crew, it's about how much the crew leader is willing to work. Some jump in with their crews to get it done faster, but don't double check work. Some don't care whether you show up or not, so sometimes they have 3 workers and sometimes they have 6. Some of them wouldn't get to know their crew and would just have everyone do the same task. Sam was an exception where she took every measure she could to ensure that the work was done both properly and efficiently.

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