The Army Crew Team Summary

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Colonel Stas Preczewski, the coach of the Army Crew team for the United States Military Academy at West Point was facing an unusual dilemma in forming Junior Varsity(JV) and Varsity(V) teams. Though he had selected best rowers for Varsity team, still they were always defeated by Junior Varsity team. National Championship is within a week and he needs to decide which team he can send to participate with over 100 schools participating in it. After reading the HBR article “The Army Crew Team” by Jeffrey T. Polzer, I believe that Coach P. should intervene to improve the performance of Varsity team and if he could not solve the situation soon, he should simply promote JV team to Varsity team. To be successful in racing, the crew must
It requires a great effort of teamwork and trust among each other. As stated in HBR article “Managing Teams for High Performance”, “A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, set of performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.” [1] We can easily see that team Varsity didn’t mix up well and were critical of one another’s performance. Their individual performance being better than team performance clearly proved that there was some dysfunction in the team. Coach P. decided to evaluate them based on leadership skills and found that most of the Varsity team members were team disruptors instead of team builders. On the other hand, JV team had no team disrupters which made them succeed in every game.
Seeing the kind of emails the teams have exchanged within each other shows that JV team was highly motivated as a team, but in contrast, Varsity team focused only on weaknesses of each other and only focused on themselves and personal performance which made them lose to JV team. Coach P. should communicate with Varsity team to know the flaws and differences they as a team are facing. As mentioned in HBR article “Managing Teams for High Performance”, “The leader must empower the team as a whole, so as to create a climate where the team feels encouraged.”

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