Making the Leap From a Potential Team to a Real Team

   I've spent the last few days contemplating how I would define the group of staff members that I work with for WSYC. For those who may not know, it is the campus radio station which operates out of the CUB. For the last few years, we have had really ineffective leaders, who mostly coasted through their jobs and did not attempt to work with other staff members. The station did not fall apart completely, but we lost most listeners and failed to establish or maintain a presence among campus organizations. Currently, we are working together to improve our programming, get all of our staff members to work together efficiently, and draw in new members.
   In "The Wisdom Of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization," Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith define a potential team as "a group for which there is a significant, incremental performance need, and that really is trying to improve its performance impact" (91). I think this is where we fit in as a group, but I am not certain. We have all agreed that we need to improve what we are doing at the station, whether that is supplying more information on the music we have available, sitting in on shows with new DJs to make sure they are comfortable with the equipment and trained correctly, supplying DJs with a copy of our radio charts, strictly enforcing rules, and reporting/appearing at more campus and community events. For the most part, we are all really trying. We have one or two staff members who have not shown a significant dedication to making improvements, but we are trying to communicate with them to find the best ways to motivate them. We are setting attainable goals, making short term and long term plans, making real changes, and improving our group communication, and hopefully we will be able to make the big improvement from a potential team to a real team (and maybe even a high-performing team).

We want to be a station that people want to listen to. 

  I think we can make this happen, but there is one glaring issue. Our membership changes constantly, and our executive staff positions are only held for two semesters before we have new elections. How can we maintain consistency in the long term when we will all eventually leave? How can we ensure that all of our hard work and plans are followed through by our successors? I am hoping that by increasing communication between staff members, and also with our general members, that we can get the majority of the group on the same page, so that when new people take on staff positions, they have a better idea what we are working toward and how much work they need to put in to make that happen. We have been discussing who we would prefer to fill staff positions when we leave so that we can hopefully help these people gain more experience before we leave, but we cannot guarantee that they will be elected.