Interview and Team Analysis - Essay Example

I once worked as part of a team in a school project. It was a group project and the teacher had formed the teams herself. There were four members in our team and I was the leader. Adopting a team approach helps develop a diversity of knowledge (Levi, 2014, p. 10). Therefore, one criterion that the teacher had kept in mind while forming these teams was that each member of a team should have expertise in a unique area of knowledge. In my team, I was expert in software, one of the team members was expert in presentation, another had a detailed knowledge of the subject, and the fourth member had access to all the external and internal sources of information and resources that we would need to develop the project.

Together, we nailed it! We distributed our roles considering each other’s skills and were able to develop and present our project within the assigned time and with quality. As a team, since we had to achieve our goal in a very limited span of time, we would resort to virtual interaction to carry on the work even after school hours. “A virtual team is any team whose member interactions are mediated by time, distance, and technology” (Levi, 2014, p. 283). We used Skype and video conferencing to keep in contact with each other to develop the project.

Levi (2014) calls virtuality a matter of degree, which implies that virtual teamwork does not necessarily completely eradicate face-to-face interactions. So when we were at school, we would interact with each other face-to-face, whereas at other times, we used to interact virtually. We learned a lot about virtual teamwork on this project and it was a wonderful experience. The interviewee was a 40-years old manager working at a local restaurant. When asked the definition of success in team management, the interviewee replied that success means attainment of all individualistic and collective goals and feeling good about it.

This definition is very much in line with how Levi (2014) defines