College of Business Dean Lynne Richardson
College of Business Dean Lynne Richardson’s weekly column in The Free Lance-Star discusses how to make teamwork more effective. Read BE A TEAM PLAYER.
IN business schools, many professors put students in teams. The teams do a variety of things. Sometimes they do classroom activities. At the other extreme, they create a project that counts for a boatload of points in the course. No matter what the team’s purpose, most students hate teamwork.
If you think about it, the business world runs on teams. Whether it’s a formal team structure like we have in classes or not, people are constantly working within and across unit boundaries to accomplish things. So it’s the opinion of business faculty that we should prepare our students now for what they will experience in their careers.
What does a good team member look like, whether in the artificial classroom setting or in the workplace?