Henry Tam and the MGI Team, Essay Example

Henry Tam, an MBA student, is in search for a challenge and finds one when he makes a decision to join MGI ownership as part of his school competition. In fact, MGI group is a small organization headed by three unique individuals and two of them, Igor and Roman, are proficient composers. Consequently, the third team founder Sasha is a college graduate with business intelligence and good finance skills. After Henry’s engagement unfolds and as other students join the MGI team, Henry becomes involved in many concepts in terms of leadership and teams. However, his dilemma haunted him throughout the case study, thus revealing the team’s dysfunctional behavior. The MGI team faced multiple obstacles that prevented from successful project accomplishment. 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 issue was the absence of a team leader who had not been appointed. They were also unable to set the norms and values, thus not developing a good working culture. Finally, the MGI team was struggling with determining the target market for their product.

So, the MGI team could not deal with dividing tasks into subtasks, thus brainstorming in a disorganized manner without determining specific outputs from each meeting or individual. Therefore, some elements were missing when putting together the business plan. In order to solve this issue I would suggest assigning different parts of the project to each team member of group of team members, thus enhancing the overall performance in terms of time and quality. Igor and Roman should be placed in charge of creative concepts and Sasha in charge of business operations. Also, I think Dav should be made responsible for production and development sectors of the project and Henry and Dana take over business analysis and marketing. Alex could also help Roman and Igor with the creative part of the project. I think Igor could as well manage sales aspect.

Relatively there seemed to be a main group and subgroups in the MGI team. Sasha, Igor, and Roman appeared to be the main group for they were the initiators of the project. One subgroup consisted of Henry and Dana, who aimed at fulfilling the HBS competition requirements. Dav, Igor, and Sasha formed another subgroup working on technical aspects and product design. Even though this division sounds pretty rational, for people with different skill can do different things, they could not manage to determine each other’s role appropriately. Consequently, they did not fully utilize the abilities of every team member, thus Henry was doing most of the job and Dav did not have that much work to complete. So, eventually, Henry and Dana took over most par of the work and appeared to be overwhelmed with the amount of tasks they had to accomplish. Moreover, there was no sufficient interaction between the main group and subgroups. Basically, all the groups worked separately, thus not having a common goal. I think it would be beneficial to determine the long-term and short-term goals, making them realistic and specific, and motivate each group to reach for goals. Long-term goals must be set using strategic planning, thus translated into activities that ensure achieving it through operational planning. If there was a leader in the MGI team, I would suggest for him to meet each team member individually and rearrange the groups if needed.

Another vital problem was the absence of team leader who was not appointed. Also nobody was courageous enough to declare himself/herself to be a leader of the MGI team. Therefore nobody was authorized to assess team’s performance and determine the role structure and decision making process of the team. The only decision in this case would be to actually appoint the leader. I would suggest Alex or Henry as a team leader. Alex would be a good match for we could see him acting as a go-between, thus he obtained sufficient creative skills along with Igor and Roman and he was about Henry and Dana’s age. He also seemed to relate to the business side of the project. On the other hand, Henry would also fit in, for he had demonstrated appropriate characteristics to become a team leader, thus controlling his emotions, and being highly analytical and confident. Moreover, in the case of conflict between Sasha and Dana, Henry acted like a compromiser trying to settle it down, thus implementing the problem solving technique which is a necessary attribute of any successful leader. Most of the team members liked Henry and he was concerned about the team in return.

Another MGI team issue was the inability to actually set the norms and values, thus not developing a good working culture. Therefore, all the members tended to attribute their failures to somebody else, which was actually of the main causes of MGI problems. After a thorough analysis of this issue 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. There was a definite communication breakdown within the MGI team for team members were not able to communicate appropriately and it caused a lot of conflicts among them, thus they uttered the same idea during several meetings. I order to solve this problem I would suggest to actually identify team norms and values and set up the decision making process. The team should also state objectives of their meetings so they could know towards what they were working. And again, in order to resolve it, the team needed a clearly defined leader, who would write down the objectives of every meeting and announce them at the beginning. Another good idea would be to fit in a timekeeper, who would make certain that schedule was checked and necessary post meeting actions were clearly determined and accomplished, thus contributing to efficient time management.

The MGI team has had some problems with specifying the target market for the product. First, they were unsure whether to market it as a game or educational tool. After reviewing the software program Dav suggested to market it as a game tool, but Henry had conducted a thorough market research and was sure the product had to be marketed to education market and teachers in particular. On the other hand, Roman wants it to be revealed to the music industry stating that education market is respectively small. In this case I would suggest taking short-term and long-term viewpoints, thus marketing the software program as an educational game.      Basically, the foundation of each and every problem of the MGI team was the absence of the leader. And whoever would be appointed he should organize MGI in such a way so as to maximize each member’s abilities in order to get MGI working towards success.

Works Cited

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