I was recently having a conversation with a HR executive
from Capgemini. She herself is an engineer who has “taken a diversion for the
better” as she put it up. In the splash of the moment, our discussion changed
hands from recruitment to graduation projects. According to her the best way to
do a project is to form a heterogeneous team; a team where there’s a sincere
student, an intelligent student and a few mediocre students. This way, she
explained, the mediocre get a slice of how projects are done.
But my opinion is a bit different. I believe that project
teams should be homogeneous so that there is a basic strata-synchronicity. This
way the students get to choose their own projects according to their mean level
which is quite nearer to their individual levels. When teams are heterogeneous,
it is often the sincere and the intelligent who do the actual work while others
watch (sometimes!) and puke out their ppts. At the end everyone in the team
gets equal credit for what only a few have done (can someone see the seeds of
organizational-life complacency here?).
The other crack in this type of arrangement becomes visible
when we view this scenario in the light of the Situational Leadership Theory.
Getting together people who are on different maturity levels creates a conflict
of competencies that takes out the wind under the rudder.
On the other hand consider people on the same maturity level
working together. That would not only create synchronicity among the team
members, but also help them to raise their group-competency-level above their
individual competency levels. When people with similar competencies come
together, they choose a goal which is mutually achievable and one that is
neither too easy nor too overwhelming for them. This in turn raises every
member’s competency level a notch higher thereby not only demonstrating the
usefulness of this model, but also builds-up a sense of responsibility,
belongingness and accountability among them.
Please drop me at least a smile, if not your comment, if you have read this so far....and yes, thank you for dropping by.
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