Communication and Organizational Change
Communication is one of the factors that influence organizational change and has a significant contribution to the prosperity of projects carried out by a team of workers. There are numerous styles of communication that an organization can employ in its setup. Every method has its suitability and effectiveness. However, for many decades there have shortcomings in communication that have affected the efficiency of the team. There are specific potential reasons for these deficiencies that have to be addressed to improve team performance.
The Role of Self-Directed Work Teams
According to Douglas et al. (2006), adopting self-directed work teams (SDWTs) is one of the ways that guarantee productivity and effectiveness in a manufacturing organization. However, using the strategy does not eliminate the need for effective communication. The study shows that there was an improvement in performance when the managers used soft skills to communicate to the teams. Therefore, one of the potential causes of shortcomings in communication is the method used to relay the message. These methods are primarily dependent on the tactics used by the team manager. For instance, some team members might feel their leader is quarreling them instead of passing information. Thus, their minds could get carried away, and they fail to grasp the content of the message; this could lead to errors during work.
Perception and Interpretation of Messages
Effective communication occurs when the recipient receives, understands, and interprets the message appropriately. Thus, another issue the perceptions of the messages once received by the team members. Different individuals will perceive the news in various ways that could interfere with the cohesion of the team.
Solutions for Improving Communication
One of the proposed solutions is training the managers' effective communication skills so that they can transform the hard skills to soft ones that influence the perception of the team members. Besides, allowing involvement of SDWTs in strategic decision making alters how operations are undertaken, and, as a result, causing a change in the communication style employed by the organization. Disbanding hierarchical communication is another viable solution; the team members should have open conversations about proposed changes among themselves. In so doing, members' participation is enhanced, and organizational change is comfortably implemented (Douglas, Martin & Krapels, 2006).
Emotional Intelligence and Effective Leadership
The Right Tact
Emotional Intelligence requires that the managers be able to identify and manage the emotions of different workers. Agile teams often need leaders with EI for them to be effective; lack of EI in managers could lead to failure. When an organizational change occurs, roles and responsibilities are often overhauled. Most team members meet such alterations with different reactions. Therefore, it requires a manager with EI to handle such situation and align the team's interest with that of the organization. For instance, the leader should take time and discuss with the team members their ambitions, concerns, and skills as opposed to dwelling directly on the newly assigned roles and execution of operations. In so doing, the emotional intelligence skills win over the team; create a safe emotional climate, foster support and openness to fresh ideas.
Acquiring Emotional Intelligence Skills
There are three ways through which agile team leaders can acquire EI skills. First, as the executions proceed, the leader should schedule and prepare for EI check-ins like any other meeting; this will allow the manager to find out, for instance, if there is a team member who feels overwhelmed with duties or if there is someone facing issue at home that is affecting his or her productivity at work. Thus, the new leaders should train themselves to ask more than the aspects of the task list.
Secondly, nurturing remote connections also boosts EI in leaders. Agile teams often have branches in different countries, the members work towards a common goal but in different geographical locations. Such groups are mostly brought together by communication and robust connections. New leaders of such teams must learn to develop initiatives that bring the members together. For instance, the manager could organize a bonding session that everyone must attend. By doing so, the team members find an opportunity to create connections.
Lastly, the new leaders must be taught to show the way; they have to lead by example by showing empathy to other members of the team. The manager should lead by creating an environment where everybody feels free to express his or her ideas. Such team members understand one another and help out where colleagues lack required expertise. Therefore, the agile team manager must learn to promote cohesion among the team members.
Psychological Safety in Work Teams
Monitoring the emotions of team members is not the only aspect that ought to be taken into account. The team members must have the Emotional Intelligence to solve the issues and effectively manage them. To incorporate EI in the teams, all the branches have to be considered. One of these branches is emotional perception, which can be instilled in members by encouraging them to engage in a more physiologically-integrated process that enable them to distinguish between right and false emotions exhibited by others.
Another important branch is emotional understanding, which involves the ability to label emotions and recognize different categories of emotion. The level of understanding can be measured in every team using short quizzes and trivia. The same method can be implemented for gauging the psychological safety, which is also a pillar in EI. The result can then be interpreted, for instance, "the perceptions of psychological safety will be minimal for teams in which one or more members have lower scores on the emotional understanding dimension." In a like manner, the results will reflect certain aspects in all the dimension of EI.
Consequently, the ultimate way to incorporate EI in the team is performing collective induction; this framework requires that the group must have adequate information, establish an agreement on the conceptual system. This framework is utilized to scrutinize how the strengths and weaknesses of individual team members' may correlate to affect the group's ability to work through emotional conflicts (Harper & White, 2013).
References
Douglas, C., Martin, J. S., " Krapels, R. H. (2006). Communication in the transition to self-directed work teams. The Journal of Business Communication (1973), 43(4), 295-321.
Harper, S. R., " White, C. D. (2013). The Impact of Member Emotional Intelligence on Psychological Safety in Work Teams. Journal of Behavioral " Applied Management, 15(1).
