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SessionThree011

Managing Team Membership: Who's In and Who's Out
SteveSmith and BeckyWinant

Description:
Feelings about who is included and who is excluded cut deep. Talk to anyone about exclusion and you will hear a personal story about a time when that person was not allowed to participate in an activity that they cherished. For instance, Steve would tell you a story about being cut from his junior high school basketball team. Heartbreaking.

Intense feelings triggered by bad experiences may cause a person to form survival rules about exclusion. A typical rule is �I must never exclude anyone (because they will get hurt like I did).� If a member of a team operates with this rule, especially if that member is a leader, the team will experience a lot of pain and anguish.

A vital task for a successful team is to extend membership to the right people and deny membership to the wrong people. This process is similar to cooking. Recipes specify the ingredients and process for mixing and cooking that will achieve the desired result. For instance, if you follow the recipe for creating a baguette but use pepper rather than salt, you will end up with something that may look like baguette but whose taste is all wrong. The same problem exists with teams -- if you add or persist with the wrong people, you will end up with a group of people who produces little or nothing rather than a team who produces the results you desire.

In this session, you will have the opportunity to be a member of a team. The team will work together to solve a series of problems. The solutions will cause each team to confront its members' survival rules about inclusion and exclusion.

The simulation is fun and powerful. Join Steve and Becky as they lead an exploration into the management of issues about who is in and who is out.

Learning Objectives

1. Practice making choices about inclusion/exclusion
2. Discuss the feelings that people have about inclusion/exclusion
3. Contrast different approaches to situations that require reducing the size of a team
4. Formulate ideas about how change agents can influence decisions about inclusion/exclusion

Minimum: 15
Maximum: 35

NotesFromSessionThree011

Back to TuesdaySchedule2003

How scientists proved that the pain of rejection is all too real

Ian Sample, science correspondent Friday October 10, 2003

The volunteers who felt most put out by the snub showed the biggest changes in brain activity. Their brain's "pain centre" had become far more active.

"The response to this social exclusion was remarkably similar to what you see in response to physical pain," said Dr Lieberman.

KenEstes 2003.10.11