Module 13 and Canaan Group Questions:

1) Think of a group or team you belong (or belonged) to: (3 marks)

a) What: Explain the nature of the work and the team or group you belong (or belonged to).
What roles were created while forming the group/team?

When thinking about a group I belonged to the best thing would be to talk about when I got
elected to be the Egyptian Society President at Nottingham University. As a president for the
society I had to choose my team that they will be working with me. The work includes
(students associate meetings, events plans, engaging students with student association
plans, etc.)
Any events that the society would like to do must go under student association approval
process that includes the financial plan and the objective for your event. The rules were as
follow:
Committee members Responsibilities
Secretary  Handling all contacts with student
association.
 Submit events proposals.
Events Manager  Plans for events in and outside the
campus.
HR  Handling all the contact with other
societies and outside events.
Finance Manager  Prepare financial plans for events in
order to raise the amount of money
in the society account.

b) Who- how many are in the group or team?

Aside from the committee members which they are 5 includes me there were 6 other
members working under the name of events team.

c) Was the process of forming a group/team easy or difficult? Why do you feel that way?
As a president you are responsible for everything that the society do which made choosing
team process more challenging. My goal was to be in top 3 societies on campus at the end
of the year, and in order to do so the team must do a hard work they also have to be welling
to give a little bit of their time end effort to the success of the society. So for forming the
team it wasn’t easy in the beginning.

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Working in a pair answer the following question:

Canaan Group: Reshaping the ECS Division case Questions:

2) Why did Patrick Lo change the way the ECS team operated? What do you think of
the strategy? (2 marks)

From the beginning the operation style for ECS was the functional style which divided the
organisation into small groups based on their specialized area. Those groups compressed to 3
categories: sales, booking and documentation.

Key factors for ECS company:

 Each client assigned to one ECS staff member because each staff member is industry expert.
 The key consideration for ECS was having satisfied customers.
 customer service representatives in booking often built strong client relationships with their
customers.
 After 2 declined on demand many carriers cut out non-core operations in their businesses, such
as documentation service.
 To retain competitiveness and client relationships, freight forwarders had to perform more
of this service for their clients.

From here the issue started to show when documentation staff members found themselves
overwhelmed by the additional work, and it was difficult to hire new staff to take on this additional
work because of the salary and limited career prospective.

The main problem in my opinion was that each staff member covered multiple industries with no
overlap in coverage. As a result, the department was caught short whenever someone was on
vacation or called in sick and this not a good thing as the company wants to keep the customer
satisfaction.

In an attempt to address the problems, Lo planned the change that the team work.

In my opinion I don’t think it’s a good strategy the nature of this work for the beginning as I said was
functional, one of the main disadvantage for this style is the poor communication and coordinate
among functional group I know it’s a disadvantage but this how the company have been working
since the startup and now Lo is trying to transfer to another style which is pairing or in a simple
word mixing 2 department together so that he can avoid the delay and department caught short.

This strategy could have been more efficient if he proceeded slowly with it and not to transform
completely like this. He first have to take the employee opinions then look into the personality of
each individual to better match them on their pairs.

This strategy results for a lot of problems that shown in next question.
 3) How are the ECS team members impacted by the change? (2 marks)
Issues in this strategy:

 The individuals in documentation were more likely to be introverts, they did not seem
comfortable dealing with clients in general.

 Some pairs gradually took on fewer booking inquiries and projects.

 Some frustration among each member of the pair.

 Resentment which was the pay disparity between booking and documentation staff.

 Certain pairings received significantly more work than others.

 Complexity of tasks assigned for each pair was not predicted.

 Less experienced staff could not adequately anticipate and solve problems on complex
shipments.

 Problems in relationship that each staff member in booking have developed with their long-
term clients.

 Little cross-training had occurred between the pairs.

 A huge turnover.
 4) Please read the article link https://hbr.org/2013/07/leadership-lessons-from-the-chilean-
mine-rescue
along with the TedTalk from Amy Edmundson, in your own words

What are the 5-10 key take aways from the Los 33, Chilean Mine Rescue article related to
Teams and leadership? (3 marks)

This article and video demonstrated how leaders communicated, empowered, directed, and succeeded
in bringing together groups of individuals to achieve a common goal in an intense, time sensitive
situation.

 Andre Sougarret was the leader for the save group he indicated adaptability when he listened to
all thoughts from low positioning and less experienced staff. (leader should listen to all his/her
team opinions in order to come up with the best successful scenario)
 guarantee appropriate engagement by utilizing the authoritative plan correspondences with
families and the press and the morning redesigns among the specialized heads and
administrators were firmly controlled and directed.
 The workforce was willing and prepared to work for accomplishments of set targets.
 Failure was inevitable; the key was to fail fast and learn fast and this is what Andre managed to
do.
 Highly directive and supportive leadership by Andre.
 Teaming is coordinating and collaborating with people across boundaries of all kinds, expertise,
distance and time zone.
 To get our work done in successful and efficient manner we need to work as a team.
 Leaders need to stay humble in the face of the very real challenging situations.
 As leader your main mission is to help team members to look at their mission in terms of the
target set.
 When you have team member you support each other and take the responsibility together

An excellent job by the team leaders using both the path-goal theory and the situational approach.
They took these two approaches and combined them together by planning that involved all team
members with everyone’s help. They moved at a rapid pace by adjusting to the situation. They kept
the families and the media informed. In the end, they made a complex, stressful situation become a
successful display of amazing leadership, teamwork, and collaboration that the whole world was
able to watch with amazement.