Lost at sea: the challenge of teamwork

Published on January 31, 2023   11 min

A selection of talks on Management, Leadership & Organisation

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0:00
Welcome everybody to Lost at Sea, which is a simulation to help us understand the challenge of teamwork. For this purpose, we're going to go on a blue ocean sailing expedition to test our skills. Now I'd like to introduce myself. I'm Dr. Stephanie Jones. I'm associate professor of Organizational Behavior at Maastricht School of Management in the Netherlands teaching leadership and team work very often and I'm also involved in practical sailing so this is based on my own research to present this simulation to you.
0:37
I have a basic sailing qualification, and I have a lovely sailing yacht in Malta in the Mediterranean, and even perhaps a lovelier one, a larger one in New Zealand.
0:49
In any kind of sailing, short local cruises or even long, tough races crossing oceans, we show our approach to teamwork and this is the way of measuring the way we approach this challenge. Now there are many different ways that we can show our skills and some of us have certain preferences. We can be very good at creative problem-solving, being an ideas person. We can be resourceful, good at making contacts, getting things fixed, and we can be very focused on coordination and pushing others to overcome their barriers. Fourthly, we can be good at careful decision-making, seeing what could go wrong. We can be focused on making sure everybody is happy and comfortable and that's very important. Sixthly, we can be hard-working, good at obeying orders, reliable, get on with it beyond time, and we can be experts in our specialist area, particularly in navigation and seamanship and showing our strong areas that we're very, very good at.