10 Sep Running head: VISION AND LEARNING 1

Running head: VISION AND LEARNING 1

 

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SHARED VISION AND TEAM LEARNING

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shared Vision and Team Learning

Cyrisse Houston Allen

Capella University

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Introduction

The Wayne-Westland Community School District is a low-income school district that is comprised of fourteen elementary schools, one middle school, and four high schools. This is a unique school district because it has primary matriculation for a larger urban city, Inkster, whose students are bused to this city for education due to the state closing of all schools in that city. The average class size is forty seven students. This district is faced with opposition from the principals to the community stakeholders from each city concerning the overcrowding of classrooms, student behavior, and state test score performance going down significantly each year. The administration of this district must become a team to present a positive front for stakeholders to believe in this school district. It is a combined vision of a picture that everyone in the school district including parents and community stakeholders carries in their heads and hearts. This is an essential component of this learning organization because it provides the focus and energy for learning.

The administrative leaders of this school district will become project team members and work together to achieve objectives and goals. In general, they actively work on one or more phases of the project, although their role can change based on the type of project phase, but they aim at achieving the same project goal. Within an organization, project team members help in establishing a shared vision and facilitate team learning of the staff and stakeholders.

Shared Vision and Team Learning

Under the context of organizational shared vision, all members pose a positive mental image of the future of the organization (Lehmann-Willenbrock, Beck, & Kauffeld, 2016). A shared vision is an image that an organization’s project team members share and hold in common of how the project outcomes will appear, work, and be accepted by the management or clients upon completion. This acceptance of vision does not mean that all members of the team have the same mental image. However, vision development within a group makes the image similar.

The building of a shared vision is a simple process, but many members of the team within an organization do not take the time to facilitate and complete the process. It is evident that project team members discuss a new project task in a practical perspective, state the requirements, discuss the likely changes and constraints, and develop a work breakdown structure and deadlines. Unfortunately, few project teams take the time as a group to understand a shared vision of the organization project. As a result, team members start developing a different image of the project’s vision, but these images are not shared among the majority of project team members (Culatta, 2019). Generally, a shared vision among the majority serves as a blueprint to achieving specific desired goals or objectives of the organization.

Organizations that do not have shared vision have limited scope of the work and become vulnerable to various issues if project team members’ images do not align with each other. The presence of shared vision enhances the coordination of team members and various levels of management, and foster a strong commitment to the overall organizational performance. Similarly, team learning plays a critical role in ensuring a specific team becomes strategically and operationally adaptive and responsive to unforeseen project changes and other changes occurring within an organization. It is through team learning in which the behaviors of organization employees get shaped, ideas and processes explored, differences discussed, and solution to them arrived to establish a new understanding that improves the development of shared vision (Erhardt, Gibbs, Martin-Rios, & Sherblom, 2016). Primarily, the reflection, sharing, and discussion of critical elements, outcomes, and processes that propel the realization of shared vision build the performance of an organization.

Application of The Concept of Shared Vision to In Addressing Problems and Opportunities for Improvement in An Organization

Team members within the organization can get engaged in developing a strategy to attain the performance goals and objectives. These people can decide to start the next meeting with a brief review of the shared vision that acts as a tool for giving performance direction. If the statement is taken in time, members asked to start formulating strategies to realize the vision statement, the existing challenges toward achieving the general objectives gets identified, solved, and resulting opportunity utilized to enhance the reality of the vision statement (Culatta, 2019). For instance, a project manager or production manager may ask workers of the organization to come up with new and customized strategies that can assist the organization to attain the statement that states “it is grateful for customers to accept and use the manufactured good.” So, a shared vision may direct the organization to consider inviting clients or consumers to meet the production and quality assurance team once in a month. Generally, the shared vision provides the company with techniques of solving the problem and ways of utilizing the existing opportunities to stay focused on the organizational objectives.

Concept of Team Learning on Addressing Issues and Opportunities for Improving an Organization

Team learning provides an organization with ways of building an organizational culture that helps in shaping and changing employees’ behavior to fit the performance culture. Through team learning, managers and members of the top management finds the best approaches of exploring, discussing, and strengthening the current culture to empower the efforts of realizing the organization statement. The power of collaborations and the organization’s ability to partner with external parties relies on the strength of team learning (Wise & Chiu, 2011). Through team learning, a company will have strong interactive skills and strategies for creating a collaborative environment for solving internal and external issues undermining the organization performance. With the team learning knowledge, an organization learns and understand the way its workers are going to behave and respond when subjected to a certain experience. As a result, the management takes proactive strategies to counter any negative outcomes in such circumstances.

How Shared Vision and Team Learning Interact to Support Systems Thinking

Share vision aim at building a strong organizational capacity since it gets powered by team learning that sets the desired behaviors and ideas to build a shared mental image among employees. As a result of this interdependence, an organization gets placed in a situation of “learning stance” which promotes new approaches of thinking and operating (Lei, Waller, Hagen, & Kaplan, 2015). So, these interconnected actions of both a shared vision and team learning influence behavior required for systems thinking. The establishment of a shared vision among and between employees and teams leads to systems thinking (Lei et al., 2015). Teams are vital to learning units and building a shared vision in an organization. Consequently, leaders cannot lead and understand without an in-depth knowledge of these systems thinking and interconnectedness between team learning and shared vision.

An organization can focus on team learning and shared vision to get its transparent systems thinking that reveal the observational process of a whole organizational system. This system gets modified by the nature of team learning capacity in which teams discuss and solve the experienced problems regarding the performance. Managers’ understanding on all actions resulting from specific employees’ behaviors and the anticipated consequences relate to the existing shared vision. Most of the time, managers emphasize on individual responses, and therefore, fail to remember the real vision or the big shared picture of the organization (Bui, 2020). However, the understanding of the correlation enables the organization to see the association and trends of change in specific circumstances. Managers will be able to determine cause and effect since they can utilize the systems thinking of the organization through the observed behaviors.

Questions that foster inquiry by a project team member on organizational change

i. What are the anticipated and required foundations of organizational change?

ii. What may involve other reasons apart from “Survival” that leads to the need of an organization change?

iii. Can these reasons get generalized for all organizations?

 

 

References

Culatta, R. (2019). Creating a Shared Vision. Educational Leadership, 76(5), 26-29.

Erhardt, N., Gibbs, J., Martin-Rios, C., & Sherblom, J. (2016). Exploring affordances of email for team learning over time. Small Group Research, 47, 243-278. doi:10.1177/1046496416635823

Lehmann-Willenbrock, N., Beck, S. J., & Kauffeld, S. (2016). Emergent team roles in organizational meetings: Identifying communication patterns via cluster analysis. Communication Studies, 67, 37-57. doi:10.1080/10510974.2015.1074087

Lei, Z., Waller, M., Hagen, J., & Kaplan, S. (2015). Team adaptiveness in dynamic contexts: Contextualizing the roles of interaction patterns and in-process planning. Group & Organization Management, 41, 491-525. doi:10.1177/1059601115615246

Wise, A. F., & Chiu, M. M. (2011). Analyzing temporal patterns of knowledge construction in a role-based online discussion. International Journal of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning, 6, 445-470. doi:10.1007/s11412-011-9120-1

Bui, H. T. (2020). From the fifth discipline to the new revolution: what we have learnt from Senge’s ideas over the last three decades. The Learning Organization.