In my early twenties I worked in a campus ministry out of a local church. I had all the ambition of a missionary, but lacked any sort of expertise or formal training. The experience itself was very much hands-on learning, as I learned to deal with obstacles within the organization as they arise. However, this has to be one of the most strenuous way to learn, trial and error. I’ve found after pursuing my bachelor’s degree in my late twenties that many of the practical theories would have been invaluable to know earlier on. I know that the opposite can also be true, young people leaving universities with all theory and no experience. I suppose either way is tough when learning to work in teams, and in my case, I’ve suffered of dysfunction within a team setting as proof. Therefore, I have a special interest in the dynamics of effective teamwork within an organization.
One important perspective of communication is the psychological perspective, which is when individual’s communication is coming from the same place as their own orientation (Gruman et al, 2017). When I first learned what a multi-disciplinary team was, I was taking a class on Child Maltreatment and Advocacy. This is a sensitive topic albeit an important one where the stakes are high. In these instances, errors made by professionals are not resulting primarily in financial loss, but in the lives of real people. In the realm of child maltreatment, a poor channel of communication could result in an abused child not receiving help, or the wrong person being persecuted. These are extreme examples of course, but the precedent for emphasizing team work within and between organizations remains.
Teams are made up of individuals with unique training and specification in one area and bringing that expertise into a team setting. Understanding that each member of a diverse team carries certain conceptual filters helps when a variety of important issues are being discussed (Gruman et al, 2017). In the example of child maltreatment multidisciplinary teams, there would be a representative from law enforcement, children and youth, and the district attorney’s office. Each team member would emphasize one facet as significant, and another would not share that same emphasis. While inexperienced teams would experience these different attitudes as conflicting, it is actually a great way to overcome selective perception, which could result in important issues being neglected (Gruman et al, 2017).
Jumping back into my early days of campus ministry, there was no such multidisciplinary perspective. Of course, each member of the group may have had a bent towards serving different social groups like athletes or fraternities, but our skills in terms of working in a group were vague. I remember participating in a leadership training at the time where we went through “the 21 irrefutable laws of leadership.” As a young, overwhelmed leader I failed to take in much about this training except one concept, the law of the lid. The concept is simple, one person cannot be strong in every area. For example, someone may be strong in technology, but not in public speaking. Another may have administrative skills, but fundraising does not interest them at all. The idea is that every person has a “lid” for how much they are capable of doing well before they require the help of others strong in different areas. The theory of social constructionism would emphasize achieving consensus and validation through the interactive experiences of socializing with others (Gruman et al, 2017). This concept stuck out to me, because I have observed early on that no one person by themselves can carry the burden of doing it all. The result may be catastrophic, the risk of burnout is likely, because we all have blind spots.
References
Gruman, J. A., Schneider, F. W., and Coutts, L. M. (Eds.) (2017). Applied Social Psychology: Understanding and Addressing Social and Practical Problems (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. ISBN 978-1-4833-6973-0