On 4th May 2024, Michael Eckolt as a managing director from Kyona Academy came to deliver a workshop for GHRM’s Production and Operations Management course by Professor Timo Eccarius. Michael Eckolt has vast experience in the industry within various functions (marketing,sales, consulting, project management, etc) and currently focuses on coaching and consulting for several companies worldwide, especially in Germany and Taiwan. Michael brought up the topic of collaboration in team setting to improve efficiency of a team in a production lineup.

The workshop started with an early lecture about collaboration. The lecture went in an interactive way by including discussion and active participation from the students. Collaboration needs to have good communication, common goals, and effective knowledge sharing. Collaboration evolved through the years; it started from the social relationship network to directive line organization, process-oriented matrix organization, and these days become agile team organization. This evolution also includes an exponential increase in productivity. This evolution also changed how organizations work. Agile team organization is important in facing recent problems because we are entering the VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity) world. This raises the importance of organizational adaptability and collaborative work culture. As time goes on, the recent job portion will change from a daily routine type of job to a more project type.

There are several stages of team performance: Working Group, Pseudo Team, Potential Team, Real Team, and High Performance Team. The team will grow as time goes on and as team members share their identity, goals, commitment, trust, and start to depend on each other more. A high-performance team also needs to be right-sized, a team can’t be too big or too small to work effectively. In addition, a high performance team needs to have autonomy, looking on the organization angle, being agile is needed but teams need to pay attention with their alignment, a high autonomy team but with low alignment can create chaos and messed the effectiveness, but a high autonomy combined with high alignment can make the agile team work effectively. This does not mean that an agile team has no rules, but they are ready to face a complex working environment with clear goals, commitment, and discipline. The session ended with an activity to test different types of teams and train teamwork as the activity went on.

The second session continued with learning about organizational performance. Michael introduced the MOPTI-model (Mindset, Organization, Process, Technology, Information) for strategic governance. Each of the sections of MOPTI can minimize the weaknesses in group work. Growth mindset is also important in the collaboration process in this VUCA environment to face new challenges and uncertainty. We have many little things we can do to support developing a growth mindset by trying new things, accepting mistakes but keeping on improving, and even in our daily conversation by changing from I can’t to I will try. The Scrum values in collaboration and team empowerment which are Courage, Focus, Commitment, Respect and Openness. Students did a domino activity to practice agile collaboration in a multi-team setting. Michael gave a summary on a better team collaboration that can be achieved by ensuring a growth mindset, treating others with respect, having transparent information or discussion, and empowering each other to grow and work together. Today’s session ended with questions and answers that talked about the fixed and growth mindset. The key takeaway is that a fixed mindset is useful when doing a task which needs a clear and rigid standard that does not change within time and a growth mindset suits the task variety and more complex problem. That is why a growth mindset is getting more important compared to a fixed mindset, while also knowing that a fixed mindset is not all bad but has different contributions instead.