Chapter 2 - Professionalism: Team, Meeting, and Etiquette Skills

                          

Professionalism: Team, Meeting, and Etiquette Skills

           

In this Professionalism chapter, I learn the importance of working in a team, having meetings, and how to develop etiquette skills. There are several important reasons why we need teamwork, which are getting better decision, having faster response, and achieving greater “buy-in”. In business world, you must be able to deal with meeting and etiquette skills which determine how professional you are.

In order to obtain high professionalism, one needs to understand how to make a harmonious team formation. Therefore, there are four phases of team development should be applied to make a unity of your team: Forming (a stage in which the members wonder about how they will fit in a team, how they feel about their place in the team, and how they define the team, rather than how they accomplish their task ), Storming (a stage in which the members respond to the differences, and find a solution to handle a conflict), Norming (a stage in which the team achieve harmony), and Performing (a stage in which the members feel satisfied with the team’s progress, solve problems in the team, and make significant progress to achieve the goal).

It is common to have a conflict in teamwork. However, it can be resolved by these six steps: listening, understanding others’ point of view, showing concern for the relationship, looking for common group, inventing new problem-solving options, and having an agreement.

As you want to reach group decisions, you can use several methods which are authority, majority, consensus, minority, and averaging. Below is the three methods which are commonly used to reach group decisions.

            What are the ethical responsibilities of group members and leaders? The practices include determining to do your best, making a commitment to fair play, giving and receiving a fair hearing, being ready to model appropriate team behavior.

Professionalism requires us to plan and participate in productive meetings. Performing specific things are necessary before meeting, during meeting, and ending the meeting and following up. To make your meetings more effective, what you should do before is considering alternatives, inviting the right people, distributing an agenda, using a calendaring program, and training participants on technology. During the meeting, you need to start on time and introduce the agenda, appoint a secretary and recorder, encourage participation, confront the conflict, and summarize along the way. In the end of the meeting, you can review meeting decisions, distribute minutes of meeting, and remind people of what they need to do. Here is an example of minutes of meeting.

In business or work environment, you need to gain an etiquette edge, such as using polite words, expressing sincere appreciation and praise, being selective in sharing personal information, and respecting coworkers. These practices may seem easy to follow. However, there will be a time when you are in a quandary. For example, you disagree with one’s idea expressed in a meeting, but you do not want to set aside the etiquette edge. Here is a video that tells you to deal with such a thing.

 

Source: http://hrweb.mit.edu/learning-development/learning-topics/teams/articles/stages-development