By: Joshua Lovette, Student at Appalachian State University, North Carolina


In any collaborative effort, team members often come from different back grounds and have different work habits and priorities. Take a restaurant for example I worked for McDonald's for six years and I have seen many people that come from different backgrounds, from your ex convicts to your college students. When I was made crew trainer I was put in charge of new employees training and assisting in managing a team. I was only nineteen at the time, most managers who used to be crew trainers said the younger employees couldn't stay focused on tasks and older employees didn't take them seriously.


I didn't have that problem due the fact that I seen the diversity of the employees I was put in charge of as an asset. I saw an increase in information, knowledge and experience. I saw a diverse view point, one that may work better than my own, but most importantly I saw higher performance levels in all employees. Using what we call group think in the business world, I was able to bring ideas in from all my employees and implement the ideas which I which I was allowed to. One idea that all the employees liked and agreed on was switching positions, they argued that it was hard to stay on task when they stayed at the same station all day every day.



So I let employees for the most part pick a position they wanted in the grill area and changed them every so often. Using group think I also found that if you give people, certain jobs and a bit of authority it makes them value their job more and strive to improve. So I found this could lower food costs and increase food production significantly.



Over coming resistance was a challenging task which I tackled head on, early in the stages of developing and training the best grill team I could I learned it's important to express understanding, what you want to do is help the other person relax and try to relate and comprehend where there coming from. Bringing resistance out into the open, discuss and find out what the reservations are about it. One thing you always want to do is evaluate others' objections fairly. Use your active listening skills to focus on what the other person is saying.



Using technologies for collaboration, is something I didn't learn at McDonald's. However, I learned this by being a student, social networking technologies are redefining team communication by helping erase the constraints of geographic and organization boundaries. My use of technology for collaboration is on much smaller scale I used technology to communicate coordinate and gather information and idea's to help enhance our projects chance of success. A huge advantage social networking brings is identifying the best people to collaborate on each problem or project, wherever they happen to be geographically.



Effective collaboration and a communication is the building blocks of having an effective team, in some situations you get to pick your collaborators, although I didn't get that opportunity, we agreed on goals and projects eminently, our team bonded through working together and breaks, clarifying individual responsibilities and positions was done in advance before the shift started. I also established clear processes, my employees new how the work would be managed from stat to finish.


Characteristics we had as a successful team has we had a clear objective and we all shared a sense of purpose, we trusted each other to do our up-most in our positions and to help each other out when one fell behind, we also communicated openly and honestly, this as you can imagine caused some conflict however, we new how to resolve conflicts quickly and effectively.