Team Roles


Write a blog entry on task-facilitating and relationship-building roles. In your blog, reflect upon your understanding of how these roles enhance team performance.

  • Consider how you generally relate as a team-member.
  • Do you actively engage your team to accomplish its mission?
  • Do you work to improve the team cohesion and collaboration?



Our immediate work group (Flight Standards) is a relatively un-diverse collection of pilots, meaning we all have similar backgrounds that include either military or civilian aviation experience.  While we do have that in common, there most definitely different personalities and personal interests that makes for a unique and fun group. 

Although our flying experience and reference point may be somewhat different, through anecdotes and “war stories” we are able to relate common experiences that contain essential information for relating to each other.  Having been together for the last 7 years, there really isn’t much new to share, just how our stories stack up to new ones. 

Beyond our immediate group, we typically interface with very diverse groups, with people with from various areas of expertise, ethnic backgrounds, or just being from different parts of the metropolitan area.  I have found that while talking shop or about the weather is a decent ice breaker or time filler, relating a simple personal tale about one’s commute into work or joking about how lousy the cafeteria food is can really enhance one’s relatability.  This is especially helpful if there’s ever a need to “socialize” on a project or question, as now a person may feel more comfortable to approach that individual directly. 

Staying on task or plan can be especially interesting when working with a large team that integrates many different skill teams or groups.  However, some of the most challenging work can be for our immediate group to reach consensus when answering a technical question from another group or customer.  The “devil is in the details” tends to ring true in these situations, as our response may have to be carefully crafted as to remain aligned with previous queries.  Thus, research into previous answers and responses must be conducted to ensure uniformity, which means one person will conduct the research to verify, while the second person will craft a response that will rely upon and be supported by this research. 

While we have weekly staff meetings in which we discuss our individual projects or interactions with programs, our group lacked a formal forum by which to discuss issues that require either group consensus or clarification.  While we can discuss somethings informally “in the cube”, keeping track of these issues and assigning responses is sometimes necessary.  Thus, our bi-weekly issues review meeting was conceived to provide a formal forum to attended to these issues.  This meeting will be celebrating its third year of service, which means I have to set a new calendar and meeting notice…  


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