A520.8.3.RB - Team Roles

Write a blog entry on task-facilitating and relationship-building roles. In your blog, reflect upon your understanding of how these roles enhance team performance.

• Consider how you generally relate as a team-member.
• Do you actively engage your team to accomplish its mission?
• Do you work to improve the team cohesion and collaboration?

I am a huge advocate of Teamwork.  In fact, my goal as a Section Chief was to bring the group of 32 Airmen together as a team.  I understand the stages of teams and was able to view them throughout the course of my tenure in Support section.  As a team-member I feel I take a more relationship-building role although I am aware that I tend to lean more that way and need to balance that role with a task-building role.  Furthermore, I am generally empathizing and supporting.  These roles come naturally and have helped build trust and better relationships with my team members.  I also thoroughly enjoy developing others to help them learn and grow.  Developing others has helped me engage the team to accomplish the mission.  For example, we have to write Enlisted Performance Reports annually and I have a lot of information and data that I collect in order to help make the process easier.  I've also attended a handful of classes to better my understanding and facilitate the process.  Throughout the year, I send out different articles, information sheets and resources as well as have mentoring sessions with my Airmen.  This has also help build an environment of information-sharing which, in turn, has improved team collaboration.  

As for task-facilitating roles, I tend to take an information seeking monitoring roles.  I love learning, therefore, asking questions and requesting different perspectives is a natural tendency for me.  I have also noticed that if I ask questions, it increases others likelihood to ask questions.  I work in a male-dominated career field where the men are very prideful.  They tend to do without thinking or asking questions even when they don't feel comfortable with something.  However, I can notice their reluctance to ask questions and don't mind asking the "silly" questions.  Furthermore, in a monitoring role I check on progress often and expect my NCOs to do the same.  In fact, I make it known that my priorities within the section are: Accountability, Timelines, Follow-up.  

Whetton, D. A. & Cameron, K. S. (2016). Developing management skills, 9th ed. Boston, MA: Pearson.