A630.8.4.RB - Build a Tower, Build a Team

I think that Tom’s analysis of why kindergarteners perform better than MBA students on the spaghetti challenge is accurate. MBA students tend to be a bit more competitive, more direct, and more opinionated than kindergarteners, all of which would impact the performance of the team. In general, kindergarteners do a very good job of thinking outside of the box, along with using their imagination and creativity. Kindergarteners are also very like-minded and think in the same terms without letting their egos get in the way of the task. I think another reason why kindergarteners might perform better is because they have very good collaboration skills. They tend to get along almost immediately with others of the same age while sharing ideas and working together as a team.

In my opinion, CEOs with an executive assistant perform better than those without one because of the outside perspective brought into the group, and also because it’s a different skillset contributing to the project. Just as CEOs require strong skill sets in business, strategic thinking, and leadership, executive assistants have creative thinking, they effectively multitask, and have strong organizational skills. When these two skill sets are teamed together they are much more effective than those of a CEO alone.

This video teaches that collaboration and communication among team members are perhaps the most important factors in team performance and effectiveness. Kindergarteners are perhaps the epitome of collaboration and communication, which is why they work so well in teams. During process intervention, collaboration and communication make up the backbone of this strategy and allow team members to realize what they need to do better, how to do it, and what the outcome should look like. This takes solid communication and teamwork to be able to go through this process.

The biggest take away from this video, in my opinion, is solidifying the fact that collaboration is increasingly important to organizations, not only teams. Collaboration entails relationship building, communication, teamwork, and putting yourself in the place of others. Kindergarteners seem to do all of these exceptionally well, except for putting themselves in the place of others. Once professionals like MBA students, executives, and managers get over their egos and learnt to truly work with one another to accomplish a goal, the results are much more positive and substantial.