By Brianna Anderson

Engineering innovations rarely happen in a vacuum. Professionals often work in teams to solve complex problems and share their ideas. However, many engineering majors need help learning how to collaborate and communicate effectively.

Dr. Jill Fennell has made it her mission to empower STEM students to excel as strong communicators and team players. As the Frank K. Webb Academic Professional Chair in Communication Skills for the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, she’s spearheading a curriculum redesign to enhance students’ interpersonal skills.

Dr. Fennell sat down with us to discuss her work with the Effective Team Dynamics Initiative and share her insights on the importance of collaboration skills in engineering education.

You started at Georgia Tech as a Marion L. Brittain Fellow in the Writing and Communication Program. Can you tell us a little about how you became involved in ETD?

Teaching students collaboration skills has always been a really big interest of mine. Oftentimes, we ask students to work in teams without teaching them how to do that. So group projects don’t always give students a meaningful learning experience or help them grow and prepare for the workplace.

I initially heard about Mary Lynn Realff because I was teaching the Junior Design course in the College of Computing and the School of Literature, Media, and Communication, which is a team-based course. But I also worked with Mary Lynn as a Brittain Fellow because I was really interested in her research, and we connected over that. And so I worked with her to adapt the Effective Team Dynamics curriculum for Georgia Tech to other universities.

Your research explores how we can use affect theory to empower students and improve how we teach technical communication. How has your research on affect theory influenced your work with Effective Team Dynamics?

A lot of my research on affect theory comes down to thinking about lived experiences and how these lived experiences make us more or less likely to use something as an educational tool. I look at how I can create different learning experiences and design learning documents to make it more likely that the students will follow the directions on the assignment sheet closely.

So I was really interested in Mary Lynn’s approach to teaching effective team dynamics, because if you’ve looked at the curriculum on the ETD website, it’s highly specific to the Georgia Tech experience. When we’re working on developing this curriculum for other universities, we’re diving deep into what it might be like to be a student at that university. Some of the work that I did was researching that university’s culture and even interviewing theirstudents on what it’s like to be part of a team at that university.

Did you see many differences between the problems Georgia Tech students encounter in teams and those at other universities? Or is it more of a universal struggle?

I think it’s largely a universal struggle. Because students are used to a kind of group work that I call Frankensteining a project. You chop it up, and then you stitch it back together. But it’s all very different parts made by very different people. And what ETD is trying to do is develop a methodology for teamwork, which is much more about collaborating on all the pieces instead of everyone focusing on their own little segments. This method is really a much better learning experience for the students because it enables students to lean into their strengths without being completely siloed.

Along with adapting the ETD curriculum for other universities, you’re collaborating on an article with Mary Lynn. Can you share a little about that project?

We’re working on an article assessing how students use strength-based terminologies, specifically Clifton Strengths. Our research asks, can we determine if our students are internalizing those terms and really adopting them? Are they able to use these terms as true members of the discourse community, or is it more surface-level?

To this end, I’ve been teaching our undergraduate student researchers who are working on this project how to code qualitative and language-based responses, as opposed to quantitative numbers. We’re creating different codes and categories so that we have a systemic way to evaluate whether the students are actually using these terms in a way that goes beyond the surface level. We’re still in the draft stages, but we’re seeing promising results.

You currently serve as the Frank K. Webb Chair. How have your experiences with the Writing and Communication Program and ETD influenced your work in this role?

I started this past August, and I teach communication skills to mechanical and radiological engineering majors. So far, my role has involved working with my colleagues and co-teachers to improve the interactive curriculum, which has a lot of project-based work for the communication assignments.

So, some of the questions we’re asking are: What communication systems do we want them to use? What are the industry expectations for that? How do we want to scaffold this skill development across their four years at the Woodruff School? How are we going to assess that when we have 1,800 students? Finally, how are we going to train our Teaching Assistants to evaluate communication skills effectively and help other undergraduate students develop them?

I’m using a lot of the skills I practiced as a Brittain Fellow because I had a lot of freedom to play with the curriculum and try different approaches to teaching communication in a very tech-heavy environment. As for ETD, I’m still using a lot of what I learned with Mary Lynn because so much of the work that they’re doing is team-based. They have their first team assignment as freshmen and then more team projects every single year until they graduate.

It seems like you’re involved in many group projects yourself. What do you enjoy about working in teams?

I like working in teams because I feel like there’s a lot of energy there. I like working with other people, sharing my ideas with them, hearing their ideas, and seeing how we can build something together. Whenever I’m working on my own, sometimes I feel a little too much in a silo.

I love working in teams because it can really be a positive environment. In my opinion, you can build something better with others than you could ever build on your own, because you’re getting all of this rich, real-time feedback and insights that you wouldn’t normally have in skill sets that you wouldn’t normally have. So yeah, I love working in teams because I enjoy the energy we can generate with each other. It’s my favorite way to do work.

Finally, what advice would you give to engineering students and other people who want to learn how to work better in groups?

My first tip is what I give to all students about interacting with their professors and with teams: Don’t hide what you don’t know. I feel like when we’re in these environments, we want to kind of come across as completely impenetrable and invulnerable in all ways. And that’s not going to be as effective for teamwork later on. Like, if you know that you have two weeks where you have a test in each of your classes, and you’re just not going to be able to pull your weight, don’t hide that from your team. Let them know at the onset so they can work around it. Don’t put yourself in a position where you have to be reactive instead of being proactive.

I also always encourage students to try to decide early, whenever they get into a team, what their nonnegotiables are. So that they can create a team charter as a sort of contract or agreement on what their expectations of the team are going to be. For example, because communication is really important to me, one of my nonnegotiables would be you can’t go more than two business days without at least reacting to one of our team messages. You don’t necessarily need to respond, but you need to let us know that you saw it and that you’re still in the loop. I always recommend that students determine based on their poor or positive past team experiences, team policies to replicate the good as well as team policies to prohibit the bad.

Thank you so much for sharing your advice with us. You can learn more about Dr. Fennell’s work and read some of her articles here.

 

 

“Authentic demand is the motivating force behind success in innovation.”

By Brianna Anderson

Academics and business leaders want to create meaningful innovations that make an impact. But even the most helpful and unique innovations often fail to attract the interest of potential customers. For every Facebook and Netflix, countless other startups and projects are met with indifference. So, what sets successful innovations apart from unsuccessful ones?

Like many innovators, Dr. Mary Lynn Realff faced this question when she founded the Effective Team Dynamics Initiative (ETD). She invented a ground-breaking training program to enhance student collaboration. However, students, her target audience, often overlooked her solution, even when they struggled with group projects. Dr. Realff knew that she had to find a new way to market her method if she wanted ETD to succeed.

The Heart of Innovation: A Field Guide for Navigating Authentic Demand traces Dr. Realff and other innovators’ paths to success. Authors Matt Chanoff, Merrick Furst, Daniel Sabbah, and Mark Wegman argue that authentic demand is the cornerstone of innovation. They write, “Successful innovation also must connect with the deep selves, the motivations, the pride, validation, ambition, et. cetera of the people from whom the innovation is intended. Not only the innovator’s deep gladness, but also the world’s great hunger” (2).

Dr. Realff uncovered authentic demand for ETD when she began searching for a new target audience. She interviewed professors about the challenges they faced and noticed a recurring theme: “Caring about their students or being seen by the students as caring seemed to matter. The way Mary Lynn was talking about her work on team dynamics began to predictably provoke professors into voicing worries about students thinking they didn’t care” (153).

This revelation helped Dr. Realff reconceptualize the audience and mission of ETD. Instead of marketing the program to students, she appealed to professors’ desire to show students they cared. She created a new pitch for the program: “Do you know that when you tell students to just go figure it out because they will need to in the real world, they think you are saying you don’t care about them? Give me two hours in one of your classes, and I can help with that” (153).

Changing her target audience allowed Dr. Realff to tap into authentic demand for her training. ETD has flourished since then, serving thousands of students and faculty. Dr. Realff has also provided training at the University of Texas San Antonio, the University of Wisconsin Madison, Sagrado University Corazon, the University of Georgia, and the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology.

The Heart of Innovation also explores case studies from startups and small companies, large corporations, and nonprofits. For each example, the authors explore how the innovators discovered authentic demand for their products and services, either accidentally or deliberately. The book also discusses the characteristics of successful innovation, arguing, “An innovation always involves a change in behavior. It’s a sustainable, repeatable change that results in a new equilibrium, a change in the form of the culture itself” (39).

The Heart of Innovation is an interdisciplinary collaboration written by four seasoned innovators: Matt Chanoff, an angel investor and co-founder of Flashpoint at Georgia Tech; Merrick Furst, a tenured professor of computer science at Georgia Tech; Daniel Sabbah, who had a forty-year career at IBM before shifting to consulting; and Mark Wegman, a leading scientist and innovator at IBM. Pick up a copy today to learn more about the evolution of ETD and the art of innovation

By Brianna Anderson

The Effective Team Dynamics Initiative is excited to announce the launch of our new podcast series, “The Whole Elephant.” This project showcases the work of the ETDI, helping students, faculty, and staff learn how to best work and thrive together in teams. Headed by Dr. Mary-Lynn Realff and now in collaboration with national and international partners, the Effective Team Dynamics Initiative provides a framework for bringing together the strengths and perspectives of different team members and creating innovative solutions to team-based problems.

Listen to Episode 1 now on Spotify or Zencastr.

We spoke to the show host, Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Lee Hibbard, about the inspiration and plans for this new series. Read on to learn more about this exciting project.

What was the inspiration for the name “The Whole Elephant”?

The name comes from a turn of phrase our collaborating professor and fearless initiative leader Dr. Mary-Lynn Realff used in conversation when she was explaining the Effective Team Dynamics initiative and how it appears to people. It became a useful metaphor for the purpose of the podcast and social media approach to trying to bring together a large and multifaceted project, and then further became an interesting metaphor for teamwork as a whole, and the idea of bringing together different perspectives to work together as a unit, to perceive the whole elephant, as it were.

What kinds of topics do you plan to explore in the podcast’s first few episodes?

The first few episodes of the podcast are focused on providing an overview of the initiative and how it’s been adopted by different departments and programs at Georgia Tech. The first episode is a conversation with Mary Lynn about the impetus of the initiative, the different programs it engages with across campus, and how it’s been expanding over time. The next two episodes are interviews with two gentlemen who collaborated with Mary Lynn, Dr. Merrick Furst and Dr. Warren Goetzel. Dr. Furst is one of the authors of a recent book on innovation through team building called The Heart of Innovation: A Field Guide for Navigating to Authentic Demand. Dr. Goetzel leads a team with the Office of Information Technology on campus as the Director of Digital Learning.

What are the advantages of using the podcast format to discuss effective team dynamics and ETD’s work?

The biggest advantage is the opportunity for conversation. Like any other interview format, it’s easy to get answers to questions, but what I like about the structure of having a podcast host and then guests coming to speak on their work is the chance for that guest and the host to bounce off of each other and share expertise and insight in a more extemporaneous format. In a lot of ways, podcasts are also a very accessible method of sharing information about in-depth and complex concepts, be it through the audio medium itself or by sharing access to a transcript people can read. Since ETD’s entire premise is based in collaboration also, the chance to attempt to model and demonstrate some of the principles ETD explores is a great feature of a conversational medium like podcasting.

Podcasting is often highly collaborative. What have you learned about team dynamics from podcasting?

Scheduling is everything. That’s the biggest takeaway of most collaborative work I’ve engaged with in my life, but especially when dealing with trying to organize even just an hour to set time aside and record a conversation, finding that time is always a challenge. But it goes to show how much Mary Lynn practices what she preaches, so to speak. Her flexibility and grace when it comes to accounting for last-minute technological issues and coordinating time to work together have been invaluable. Adding to that the importance of collaborative informative conversation, and I think what I’ve really learned is that so much of team dynamics is about bringing together people’s stories and determining how they interweave together along lines of topic and theme. No matter what a person’s level of expertise may be, there’s always value in sharing perspectives across different levels of experience.

What do you hope listeners will take away from the first episode?

To check out ETD in more detail, of course, first and foremost. To consider the interplay of different team dynamics in their day-to-day experiences and how teamwork impacts their lives in professional and personal spheres. Most importantly, to look at the experiences they’ve had, how they’re impacted by the people around them, and how they can consider those stories from the point of view of working together and learning to collaborate. A lot of times, it’s difficult to do that without the right tools and language to explain and describe the experiences a person has been through, and things like ETD help provide that language and share a useful toolkit for expressing and growing through teamwork.

 

By Mike Lehman

Working effectively as a team is an essential part of collaboration, especially in an educational environment. Group dynamics are often not about the individuals in the group but rather more about how team members interact and contribute. Effective team dynamics can create a sense of belonging and community among students, faculty, and staff. This team cohesion fosters a positive and supportive environment where everyone can fully participate and feel valued.

Georgia Tech’s Effective Team Dynamics Initiative (ETDI) focuses on how research teams effectively reach their outcomes through collective contributions. By creating a supportive learning community focused on strengths-based collaboration, ETDI’s work has impacted over 7,200 undergraduate students, 800 graduate students, and 1,600 faculty and staff. In collaboration with the Center for Teaching and Learning at GT, ETDI has developed a curriculum at Georgie Tech. Additionally, our innovative program has been brought to other institutions, including the University of Texas San Antonio, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Sagrado University Corazon, the University of Georgia, and the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology. ETDI facilitators have also worked closely with regional academic institutions, including Fort Valley State University and Gordon State College.

This article reviews ETDI’s approach to strengths-based collaboration and educates faculty and administrators about strategies they can use in any setting. We’ll also discuss how you can bring ETD to your campus to build stronger collaborations.

What is the Importance of Effective Team Dynamics?

As we have discussed in previous posts, understanding effective team dynamics can be broken down into three questions that raise self-awareness by focusing on strengths to better understand how you work with others:

• Who Am I? Identify your unique skills, interests, and approaches to problems. This question allows you to understand yourself, and in turn, understand others better.
• How Do I Team? Recognize the interests and skills of your team. This step helps you to bring your strengths to the team.
• How Do We Team? Consider how your group can work interdependently. This process enables each team member to effectively use their individual strengths and abilities.

Addressing these questions establishes a strong foundation for effective teaming and collaborative work. Knowing how a team works increases engagement among members and leads to more productive collaborations. By creating a collaborative environment at the start, your team can develop a broader perspective on approaching projects.

How to Improve Teamwork and Collaboration

Improving team dynamics and collaborative work benefits students, faculty, and staff. Communication is a key component of collaborative work. Teams can use this essential skill to resolve conflicts and define roles and responsibilities from ideation to project completion.

• Focus on Communication: Effective teams establish an environment based on open and honest communication. Team members should be encouraged to share their ideas and concerns.
• Define Roles and Responsibilities: Communicate the roles and responsibilities of group members, considering both smaller tasks and long-term goals. Once each group member knows their responsibilities, collaboration will be more effective.
• Resolve Conflict: Disagreements will happen, but it is important to address them early. Create guidelines to resolve group conflict at the onset of the project.

Focusing on these primary aspects of effective team dynamics can create an environment conducive to collaboration in a remote setting or in interdisciplinary work.

Using the CliftonStrengths to Improve Teamwork

Georgia Tech’s Effective Team Dynamics Initiative provides resources and training to help students and other community members navigate team and group challenges. Specifically, students need help  creating and sustaining a positive team environment. Likewise, faculty members want to provide positive learning environments and experiences for their students.

ETDI uses the Gallup CliftonStrengths Assessment to teach students, faculty, and staff practical methods to improve team dynamics. Following the assessment, participants receive a comprehensive report that reveals the five most important CliftfonStrengths themes for the individual. These strengths provide a roadmap to apply your strengths and unique traits to everyday activities and group projects.

By starting with strengths, effective teams dynamics can be further developed with group dynamics activities. One popular and effective team activity is “claiming your strengths.” This exercise has participants develop a common language to discuss skills and strengths in a group, understand different types of contributions, and build communication strategies.

In this activity, participants complete the CliftonStrengths assessment and highlight their strengths. Then, individuals are put into teams to discuss how their own strengths can benefit the team. This process helps participants to understand how their strengths complement other team members’ strengths.

How ETDI Can Help Your Campus 

Creating a positive team culture and effective team dynamics is a process. The first step to effective team dynamics is creating an environment emphasizing collaboration through open communication lines. Once team members understand how to apply their strengths to the team, cooperation follows with clearly defined roles and responsibilities.

Georgie Tech’s ETDI facilitators are experts in guiding teams in group projects and leadership development. Recently, Dr. Renita Washington, the Academic Advising Manager for Georgia Tech’s School of Materials Science and Engineering, traveled to Gordon State College to lead a workshop on using strength-based language to navigate challenging team dynamics. She used interactive activities to help deans, chairs, and classroom leaders understand their strengths to help them become better leaders. Part of her task-based sessions include having participants discuss past sources of conflict and brainstorm actionable items to avoid future problems.

Likewise, Dr. Stephanie Merrick, an ETDI facilitator and coach, brought her passion for cultivating excellence in individuals and teams to Fort Valley State University, an HBCU in the University of Georgia. Merrick brought a personalized and interactive workshop to students that focused on team development and leadership and provided exercises based on their CliftonStrengths assessments.

ETDI offers curriculum sets for undergraduate and graduate students, but we also work directly with campus leaders at Georgia Tech and other universities. Please contact us to learn how ETDI can assist you in implementing strength-based team building.

 

By Mike Lehman

Undergraduate and graduate students commonly need to complete tasks and projects in groups. Team collaboration in a classroom setting is often a way to distribute the workload to complete a project seamlessly. Still, certain group work challenges can impact working effectively as a team. In addition to dividing labor based on roles, working in teams is often lauded as a way to increase productivity, share knowledge, create efficient processes, and raise the creativity of final projects.

Yet, group work also lends itself to certain challenges, especially for individuals who are more productive and creative when working alone. Communication is one of the primary issues that students face when working in groups. This difficulty can be mitigated by setting clear guidelines for conflict management for both individual team members and the group at large.

The classroom is the starting point for developing effective team dynamics, which can transfer to professional and workplace settings. Georgia Tech’s Effective Team Dynamics Initiative (ETDI) offers workshops for students to help them effectively resolve group conflicts. ETDI has developed specific strategies to promote effective remote collaborations and is also a great resource to learn how to resolve conflict with practical resolution strategies.

This article teaches students strategies to address conflict in group projects and improve team dynamics.

What Are the Challenges of Group Work?

Group work empowers students to cultivate diverse skill sets, foster collaborative learning, simulate real-world scenarios, enhance academic performance, and promote personal growth. These skills are all essential for future success in college and the workforce.

Group work can be a valuable learning experience, but it also has its challenges. Here are some of the most common types of team conflict for students:

• Communication
• Conflict
• Time Management
• Accountability
• Leadership

In group work, communication is a critical component of effective collaborative work. Communication issues can lead to overall complications in completing tasks. Problems oftens arise from language and cultural differences, differing communication styles and personalities, and a general lack of clarity. Communication issues can also lead to conflict, which covers disagreements about how to approach a project in addition to equitably dividing responsibilities.

Meeting deadlines and coordinating schedules can be difficult for groups, especially large teams. Students have different schedules and time commitments, and the inability to meet regularly can lead to frustration and missed deadlines. Holding individual group members accountable for deadlines ensures the completion of tasks but leads to conflict itself if it is not communicated professionally. In certain instances, a lack of leadership can result in inefficiency. It’s important to find a good balance between leadership and allowing creativity and contribution among all group members.

It’s important to map out clear expectations for individual contributions to avoid group conflict. This agreement should include guidelines for conflict resolution. In the next section, we will discuss how to resolve team conflict.

Team Conflict Management

Efficiently navigating group work challenges and resolving team conflict is necessary to maintain a productive workflow. Here are some strategies for students to handle group conflict:

Address Conflict Promptly

Promptly addressing conflict can prevent disruptions. Ignoring issues will only lead to more problems in the future. Additionally, open and honest communication promotes seamless collaboration. If everyone feels comfortable sharing their ideas, conflict can be resolved before it gets out of hand.

Be Willing To Compromise

When problems arise in group work, compromise is necessary in navigating group work challenges. Each team member should be willing to be open to other perspectives in order to meet common goals. You may need to give up one of your demands to find an agreeable solution.

Seek External Advice

One of the final ways to manage conflict is to seek external advice. For students, this is often a last resort since group work is designed for students to learn how to manage conflict internally. With that said, students should always reach out for external support to help navigate team conflict.

An example of a team conflict resolution strategy is to draft a group contract that includes member responsibilities. This document creates guidelines for members to follow, which should include the following categories:

• Group Expectations: Clearly detail the project and individual responsibilities for each stage of the project
• Tasks and Deadlines: Map out individual and group tasks with deadlines both external and internal deadlines
• Group Procedures: Spell out how the group will communicate, share work, and who is responsible for specific roles within the group
• Personal Accountability: Explain the unique strengths of individuals and set guidelines for resolving conflict

Other effective collaboration strategies include creating a team action plan, practicing effective communication, and delegating tasks and responsibilities. Navigating team conflict is a process that requires open communication, understanding, and compromise of each team member.

How ETDI Can Help

Leveraging individual strengths is a cornerstone of ETDI. Using Gallup’s CliftonStrengths Assessment, ETDI empowers students, faculty, and staff to harness their unique talents and enhance team performance.

For students, utilizing CliftonStrengths when forming teams and executing tasks promotes project success and completion. Recognizing and capitalizing on one’s inherent strengths creates a competitive advantage, paving the way for success through understanding and nurturing individual talents. Additionally, ETDI offers curriculum sets for undergraduate and graduate students. The undergraduate curriculum set includes activities for first-year seminars and senior design.

DeMarco Williams, an ETD facilitator, advises students to maintain an open mindset when working in teams, lean in on their own strengths, and allow others in the group to fill the gaps. He recommends working with the ETD facilitators to build and understand strengths to lead to more effective teams.

If you would like to learn more about how to enhance team dynamics and understand your own personal strengths, please contact us to set up a free workshop or have