Team Structure

In my Co-Op at Ashland, I was the intern of the engineering team of four engineers and an engineering manager. Our team worked on fifteen different chemical products were each engineer worked with three to four products each. As the intern, I helped each engineer with whichever projects needed to get done for them when it came to managing the production of the chemicals that they were in charge of. In general, the team definitely had a one boss arrangement at the surface. My boss seemed to be very stressed and would always work around ten-hour days for the most part. I would say he was very demanding and there were not enough people on our team handle all that was needed to be done in the time that he wanted. On days that production flowed smoothly, each engineer was still working on trying to continuously improve their processes but the days seemed less stressful for my boss because there were no urgent deadlines or problems going wrong in the plant. Overall, on those days production seemed to go smooth and efficiently but when problems in production seemed to occur my boss seems extreme busy and frustrated.

Moving on from the general setup of one boss within the team, there was another boss on my floor who was in charge of both the process engineering teams, which include my boss’s team and another engineering manager and his team. This gave both teams boss’s a sense of competitive nature especially because the process engineering manager was about to retire soon and they were competing for his job. The reason they were for his job was because of the less stress and more pay they job entailed. The process engineering manager seems like he was never really that busy and would always walk around the office to talk to people. He also always seemed like he was thinking of improving the processes that he was running and mainly only talk to the engineering managers.

Aside from the one boss scenario within my team their seemed to be a sense of seniority within the team of engineers based on who has been their longer. The most senior engineer on the team was the boss if the engineering manager was not there and many of the engineers would speak to him for advice before going to the manager if need. This was not so much simple hierarchy because they were all reporting the same boss in essence but there was some stigma based on how long you were on the job and how talented you were. One of the engineers were there for as the second-longest but had horrible communication skills so he seemed to be lower on the totem pole then the newer engineer who had better communication skills and more experience at other company but was only with Ashland for five years.

There was also a sense of a circle network within the group as much of the information flowed freely and there was an open door policy within the company. This means that anyone could talk to anyone in the company and ask them for information no matter what their status was in the company. This allowed free flow of information in our group and some decisions were made by the boss by consulting other engineers on the team. The flow of information was sometimes in the flow of a circle network but also in the flow of a cross-sectional network based on the project. If there was a project that included the whole team members would share information cross-sectionally through group meetings and email groups, and whoever knew the answer to problems would respond to the questions asked in these groups. The flow was somewhat chaotic but also got some projects down faster at times.

Overall, I would say my team was moderately successful and many the processes of the plant were still running and the plant was making money but I also feel like the processes of the plant could have been optimized better. I feel like according to Katzenbach, we as a team had the potential to be a high performing team but were lacking some key characteristics of a high preforming team. For instance, I would say our team was of manageable size but the projects that would be assigned to our team were too many and so more people should have been hired to evenly distribute the work and prevent projects from being dropped by the waist side. I would also say that our team had a sense of commitment to the project but when it came down to the nitty-gritty some of the members would assign me several projects that needed to get done right away because they did not have time to finish the rest on their own since they did not allocate their time correctly. Therefore, I would get the blamed for my boss I  could not finish projects assigned to me by the due date since there was poor planning on some of the team members parts. The team met most of the requirements to have the potential to be a high performing team but lacked some aspects of their requirements that are made the teams seem unorganized and confused at times, which led it to be moderately successful.