Exercises: Work teams

Explain what distinguishes a team from a simple group of people. Give an example of each from the following situations: passengers on a bus, a music band, students waiting in the canteen queue, an athletics relay team.

In a school project team, the following roles emerge: coordination (delegates tasks and monitors deadlines), communication (liaises with outside parties), treasury (manages and accounts for money), and documentation (records decisions). Match each action to its corresponding role: (a) requests permission from the local council; (b) records the $15\ \text{€}$ spent on posters in the sheet; (c) reminds everyone that the deadline is Friday; (d) drafts the minutes of the meeting.

The figure shows the organisation chart of the school fair team, but one of the roles is covered with a question mark.

1. a) Think about which role is missing to ensure the money from the market stall is controlled, and justify your answer.
2. b) Explain what would happen if that role did not exist: two specific problems that could occur on the day of the market.

Explain what a role is within a team and why each role should have a name and clear tasks. Give an example of what happens when 'everyone does everything' the day before the fair.

Match each task of the school newspaper club with its role — coordination, writing, layout, publicity or treasury: (a) decides the front-page story and the deadlines; (b) buys the paper and notes down the expense; (c) uploads the new issue to the website and announces it on social media; (d) writes the interview with the head teacher; (e) places texts and photos into the template.

Explain what trust is within a team and how it is built (keeping promises, asking for help without embarrassment, not ridiculing mistakes). Give an example of one action that increases it and one that destroys it in a project group.

A team of $5$ people has a weekly meeting. Write the three minimum rules that would make those meetings useful (an agenda, a time limit, written agreements with an owner) and explain what happens to a meeting without rules.

Explain the difference between helping a teammate and doing their job, with an example from the fair stall: your teammate on the till is overwhelmed at rush hour. What do you do in each case and why does the difference matter for the team in the long run?

Agile teams use a board with three columns: "To do", "In progress", and "Done", along with a daily five-minute meeting. Explain what the team gains from each of these two tools and how you would apply them to a short film project for the school cultural week (give two examples of cards on the board).

Your team of four needs to prepare for the science fair. Profiles: Ada draws very well but arrives late; Bruno calculates quickly and is organized; Carmen talks to anyone comfortably; Dario builds things with his hands better than anyone. Allocate the tasks — posters, budget, contacting other teams, and model making — according to each person's strengths, and explain how you will address Ada's weakness.

You can do it on paper and send a photo with your answer.

Teams usually go through stages: getting to know each other and acting cautiously; encountering initial friction; agreeing on rules; and finally achieving high performance. Identify which stage each scene of a drama group represents and explain what the coordinator can do to move to the next stage: (a) nobody speaks up to avoid causing offence; (b) two actors argue over the main roles; (c) the group independently delegates tasks for the opening night.

Your team of $6$ people is preparing the escape room for the cultural week. Share out the roles (coordination, puzzle design, construction, communication, treasury, documentation) taking into account these profiles: Amaia invents brilliant riddles but hates public speaking; Bernat organises and remembers deadlines; Clara draws and builds; Iker talks to anyone; Nora is careful with money; Pau writes and documents everything. Justify each assignment and say which role could end up shorthanded.

You can do it on paper and send a photo with your answer.

The jam stall team works without a board: everyone is 'getting on with things' and nobody knows what is missing. Three days before the fair they discover that nobody bought the jars. Explain how a three-column board (to do, in progress, done) would have avoided the scare, set up the board for the last two weeks with at least eight cards, and point out the critical card.

Two partners argue about who works more. The numbers: one has put in $12$ visible hours (stall, sales) and the other, $8$ invisible hours (purchases, accounts, posters). Explain why invisible work is valued less and which three mechanisms would make all the team's work visible (a board, an hours log, task rotation) before the argument breaks the project.

Your cooperative takes on three new members halfway through the school year. Design the welcome plan for their first week: which document sums up the project for them (mission, rules, accounts), which small task with guaranteed success you give them first, and who acts as 'mentor'. Explain what a team that doesn't welcome newcomers well loses.

The short-film team has one-hour meetings that drag on without agreements. Propose the new format: $15$ minutes standing up, three questions per person (what I did, what I'll do, what's blocking me) and agreements noted down with an owner and a date. Explain what each piece of the format gains and how you would check in two weeks that it works.

In the school newspaper team, Sara writes half the articles, proofreads the rest, and designs the layout. The other three "help out if they can". Sara is exhausted and the newspaper relies entirely on her.

1. a) Diagnose what is going wrong in the team organisation (roles, distribution of tasks, reliance).
2. b) Propose a concrete reorganization: which roles to create, which tasks to delegate, and how to verify in a month's time that it has worked.

Design a task board to organise the entrepreneurship fair in $4$ weeks: write at least eight real task cards (permit, budget, suppliers, posters, float money, setup rehearsal...), distribute them across the columns based on the current stage, and assign a responsible person to each. Explain which two cards you would monitor daily in the brief stand-up meeting and why.

The two partners of a jam stall have been arguing for a week over the product name, and the project is at a standstill. Design a decision-making protocol for conflicts: what steps to follow when the team cannot reach an agreement (written arguments, deadline, testing with customers, voting, tie-breaker) and apply it to the naming issue to show how it would be resolved.

On the school yearbook team, the coordinator hands out tasks by affinity: to her two friends, the showy tasks (front cover, interviews); to the rest, the invisible ones (proofreading, filing). The atmosphere has cooled and two people want to leave.

1. a) Diagnose which principles of good task-sharing have been broken (fairness, transparency, making the most of strengths versus favouritism).
2. b) Design a fair allocation system for the next issue (tasks published, assignment by turns or a draw, a log of accumulated tasks) and explain how lost trust is rebuilt.

Your $6$-person team is organising a charity concert whose proceeds will fund the end-of-year trip. Two weeks before the event, the person exclusively in charge of the soundboard and lighting moves to another city, and no one else knows how to operate the technical equipment or how it is configured.

1. a) Analyse the organisational causes that have turned an unexpected absence into a lethal threat to the project, and evaluate its impact on costs and reputation if the event is cancelled.
2. b) Design an urgent contingency plan to resolve the technical situation within $14$ days, and write a continuity protocol (management of substitutes and knowledge transfer) applicable from day one to critical roles in any school project.

A team of $8$ people takes ages to decide anything: every proposal opens a one-hour debate. Another team of $8$ decides quickly because it delegated: two people decide on posters, two on the till, and only the big decisions go to the assembly.

1. a) Compare the two models (everything in assembly versus delegation with accountability): what each one gains and what it risks.
2. b) Design for your cooperative the list of decisions that must belong to everyone and those that are delegated, with the mechanism for reviewing a delegated decision if it goes wrong.

During a meeting of a school cooperative for handmade products, two partners argue heatedly: one defends lowering prices by $15\,\%$ to sell a higher quantity, while the other proposes keeping them and adding eco-friendly packaging. The coordinator cuts them off, saying: «Enough; in a good team there is never any conflict. To avoid bad feelings, we will draw lots».

1. a) Refute the coordinator's statement by distinguishing the nature of the disagreement taking place from a destructive personal dispute, and predict the organisational and economic consequences of resolving strategic disagreements at random.
2. b) Design a three-step decision-making protocol to steer this type of disagreement towards a data-driven solution, ensuring that the debate enriches the project without fracturing group cohesion.

Your team has just finished the fair and must hold a 'retrospective': what went well, what went badly and what will change next time. Design the complete $45$-minute session: how opinions are gathered without two people dominating, how the most important points are voted on, how a complaint is turned into an action with an owner and a date, and which document comes out of the session for next year's team.