CMI 502 Assignment Example
Knowing how to develop, manage, and lead teams is a key skill for managers. To be effective, managers need a strong understanding of team development and leadership models, along with the ability to apply these theories in real workplace situations, especially when managing team leaders and handling multiple or remote teams.
Assessment Questions
Table of Contents
Assessment Question
Task 1: Report on the approaches to developing, managing and leading teams
Introduction
Field service creates an unusual leadership problem. The people doing the work are dispersed, spend the day alone in customer buildings, and see their supervisor perhaps twice a month. The team exists as a name on a rota rather than as a group occupying a room. This report addresses that reality across the four assessment criteria.
AC 1.1 Evaluate the use of TWO theoretical models for developing, managing and leading teams
Katzenbach and Smith’s team performance curve. The model plots five positions: the working group, whose members share information but have no joint deliverable; the pseudo-team, which calls itself a team but has no shared purpose and performs worse than a working group; the potential team, which is attempting to establish purpose but has not yet built mutual accountability; the real team, characterised by complementary skills, shared purpose and mutual accountability; and the high-performing team, which adds deep commitment to one another’s growth.
The model’s outstanding contribution is the pseudo-team, and it is the reason this model was selected. Halewell’s regional groupings are routinely described as teams and mostly function as working groups: engineers hold individual job lists, are measured individually, and their success does not depend on one another. Naming this honestly is more useful than pretending otherwise, because the model’s central warning is that imposing team language on a working group produces a pseudo-team, which is the worst position on the curve. The model also makes mutual accountability, rather than friendliness, the defining feature of a real team, which correctly identifies why social events do not improve performance.
Its limitations are real. It offers no method for moving between positions, describing the states without specifying the transition. Its evidential base is practitioner-derived rather than experimental. It also implies that being a real team is the goal, when for parts of Halewell’s operation an efficient working group is the appropriate form and attempting more would waste effort.
Lencioni’s five dysfunctions of a team. The model describes a sequence in which absence of trust leads to fear of conflict, which produces lack of commitment, which permits avoidance of accountability, which results in inattention to collective results. Its logic is that each dysfunction enables the next, so intervention must start at the base.
Its usefulness at Halewell is diagnostic. When a regional team failed to hit first-time-fix targets for three quarters, the visible problem was inattention to results. Working down the sequence identified the actual origin: engineers did not challenge the planning helpdesk’s scheduling decisions because a previous supervisor had treated challenge as complaint. The model’s inverted approach, treating the visible symptom as the last link rather than the problem, is genuinely valuable. Its emphasis on productive conflict is also a useful corrective in a workforce culture where getting on with it is prized and disagreement is avoided.
The limitations are more significant than its popularity suggests. The model is derived from consulting experience presented as a business fable, not from research, and the causal sequence is asserted rather than demonstrated. It locates all dysfunction in interpersonal dynamics, which means it will misdiagnose problems whose actual cause is workload, poor systems or inadequate parts availability, all of which are more common causes of missed targets in field service than a lack of vulnerability-based trust. There is a real risk of treating a resourcing problem as a relationship problem.
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