Henry Tam and the MGI Team Assignment, Essay Example

The MGI team consisted of seven members, including three founders – Igor Tkachenko, Sasha Gimpleson, and Roman Yukab, Dana Soiman and Henry Tam from Harvard Business School, Dav Clark from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Alex Jan Sartakov from Boston Berklee College. The forming stage of the project occurred over a few meetings, for not all of the members were present in the beginning. Roman appeared to be absent on the first meeting, Alex was introduced on the second one, and Dav did not get together with a team until third meeting. Frustration, confusion, and conflicting expectations can be seen in the storming stage. Dana and Henry perceived themselves as strategic contributors, but Sasha simply considered them as interns or business plan writers, while Igor actually saw them as simply helping with vision and strategy. Consequently, Henry claimed: “We were the CEOs of the group; we were directing people to do different tasks, forming coalitions, doing management, and so forth. It was really a drain on us.” Furthermore, we observed a huge mistake in the norming stage, for the team did not take a time to sit down and discuss the norms and values that must be followed in order to achieve the desired goal. In their actions there were was no coherence, for Roman could not agree with the Russians and Henry and Dana did not support Sasha and vice versa. The brainstorming session was not efficient because it was far too lengthy. Consequently, the performing stage appeared to be problematic for the team could not effectively manage the previous ones.

There were four major problems the team faced when developing their project. First, they did not manage to divide the task into subtasks. Secondly, they were divided into main group and subgroups, thus not utilizing the abilities of each and every team member. The third problem was the absence of a team leader who had not been appointed. Finally, the last issue was the inability to set the norms and values, thus not developing a good working culture. If we considered the last issue closely we would notice that it was predominantly reactive actions example of Henry and Dana playing a good and bad cops with Sasha, thus Alex had to explain Dana the way creative people were supposed to work and cooperate. The members of the MGI team also were blaming each other, thus Roman and Igor tried to blame Sasha for ignoring the sales, while blamed Dana, Henry and others for not considering and using his suggestions. As a result, Henry could have contributed to the team by adding norms and values. MGI’s team major problem was the lack of the decision making process, for every moment they seemed like coming to the decision somebody would oppose, thus they had to start it all over again. Along with it, they could not properly manage their time and clearly define the objections of their meetings. In this turn, Henry could have contributed by identifying the meeting objectives and delivering them to the group prior the actual meetings. Henry could also assign a timekeeper to follow every meeting in order to ensure that the schedule was checked and strictly followed, thus necessary post meeting actions stated and accomplished.

Works Cited

Polzer, Jeffrey Vargas, Ingrid, and Hillary A. Elfenbein. “Henry Tam and the MGI Team.” Harvard Business School. 20 Oct. 2003.