A Successful Team

A successful team that I have been part of was when I was working in The Leadership Committee (TLC) as part of the RSO TAG (Transfer Advisory Group). TLC was one of several committees under TAG, but worked autonomously from the rest of the committees and even TAG. The other committees included Marketing Committee and Social Committee which both worked together with each other and the rest of TAG to plan events and get new members to join. TLC on the other hand was more of a special projects committee which focused on completing projects that helped transfer students. These potential projects had an unlimited scope, so they could be anything. When I was just a member of TLC the committee chair, Lauren, was leading a project whose goal was to bring attention to the unique needs of transfer students to the Dean of Students of LAS, in the way of a presentation. The way she organized her committee was dividing the committee into two sub-committees which focused on two different aspects of the presentation. These two sub-committees worked together to make one presentation, one sub-committee focusing on gathering the data required for the presentation and the other sub-committee focusing on the actual presentation of materials.

A structure described in Re-framing Organizations that most accurately describes the was TAG was organized, is the Simple Hierarchy diagram on page 105. The president of TAG did not have much control over TLC but still sometimes sat in on meetings to see how things were progressing. Although he did meet with Lauren regularly as part of the exec board to make sure TAG as a whole was running smoothly. Lauren was the sole person in charge of TLC but delegated people to be in charge of each sub-committee. I was in charge of the presentation sub-committee and led my small group to finish the specific way we wanted the presentation to look as discussed with Lauren. Lauren was also in charge of the data gathering sub-committee, so the simple-hierarchy model does not match exactly how TAG and its sub-committees were structured.

In terms of how Katzenbach and Smith describe a successful team, TLC did not match most of the 6 characteristics of a high-quality team. We did all have a common goal of bettering the transfer experience, but we did not have the right mix of expertise, at least in my opinion. And because this is an RSO and not a professional working group, there was not much accountability for the work produced. This caused some people to do more work than others and others to drop the project completely with out any repercussions. 

Opportunism

Back in 2012 when I was still living and going to school in Chicago, I had a weekend job as a Production Assistant (PA) for productions filming in the city. Since being a PA was a contract position, meaning you were hired only day by day, there was an intense amount of competition among people wanting to work each day. I personally got lucky on one of my first days and happened to be in the right place at the right time and was able to work directly with one of the Assistant Directors, who was impressed by some of the work I was doing, Since that day I started getting personal invitations to work each day and was doing more important work than the average PA. Because of my new recognition on the set, the producers started asking me to come in during the week too, which unfortunately I had class during that time. Even though I could have skipped a couple of classes to have an opportunity to work with some of the higher-up executive producers and maybe really get my name known in the Chicago film industry, I decided not to. Instead when asked if I can work those days, I referred them to one of my friends who was not as lucky as me in getting noticed. With my recommendation my friend got an opportunity to work personally with the executive producers and was able to impress them enough to become a regular PA on the movie. 

Although it does seem like I missed out on a chance to act opportunistically and continue progressing within the Chicago film industry without a major dent in my academics, I did have reasons not too. One of my reasons was ethical, since my friend was the one who got me involved initially and this was his main career goal and source of income, I felt like it wasn't fair I was getting the job calls just because of luck. My other reason was that I would not have been able to commit myself 100% to this movie because of school and would not have been able to progress as much as my friend did. I viewed my recommendation as an investment, hoping that when I was off of school and looking for a job, I could always count on my friend to pass on the favor and mention my name to whatever new production he was working on. Unfortunately I ended up transferring to UIUC so never got another opportunity to work on anything else, while my friend has been excelling and getting his name known. Maybe sometime in the future I will be really grateful I did not act opportunistically back in 2012. 

My Experience with Organization Structures

This summer I worked for the Student Academic Affairs Office (SAAO) in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. My responsibility in the office was to coordinate the revision of the Student's section of the new LAS website. The overall website was being redone by ATLAS, but each department was tasked with updating their own section. SAAO was the first section to hire someone specifically to help them with their section. I was hired by the Associate Dean of Students who is in charge of the whole office, and she only has the main Dean of LAS and the Assistant Dean of LAS to report to. The rest of the office consists of a group of assistant deans, faculty members and academic advisers. There is only one assistant dean who seems to be in charge when the associate dean is absent and he coordinates the rest of the assistant deans.

My job was to understand this structure and to plan the website accordingly. This job was complicated greatly due to this structure, in addition that there were numerous other departments and offices working out of SAAO, such as Secondary Education, International Programs, Honors and many others. The content of the website was controlled by the Marketing Department which was working with ATLAS for the technical aspects. My job was to get the content and pages looking how the department heads wanted, and then deal with the Marketing Department with getting the pages approved so they matched the overall theme set by ATLAS.

The transaction costs I had to consider where mostly the time constraints in getting the website ready by the time the Fall 2014 semester started. From tracking down content, to meeting with department heads, each section was a lengthy process. Then waiting for the department heads to submit content to me and formatting it to fit the web page took a long time too. After that there was the process of having the Marketing Department scrutinize every aspect and word choice of the page till it was the way that they wanted LAS to be represented. Overall it was a busy summer. 

Amy Finkelstein

Amy Finkelstein

Born on November 2nd, 1973 in New York city, Amy Finkelstein is currently a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research focuses primarily in public finance and health economics. One of the projects she is currently working on is the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment, which tracks how effective Medicaid coverage is for low-income uninsured adults.

She has also received many awards for her work in economics, such as the John Bates Medal and the American Society of Health Economists’ ASHEcon Medal. Her paper titled The Aggregate Effects of Health Insurance: Evidence From the Introduction of Medicare has been cited 205 times, and is about the effect of the introduction of Medicare in 1965 on hospital spending.