Giving Help and Feedback

While help-seeking activities invite others to participate in solving problematic situations, these activities do not guarantee collaboration. As a response to help-seeking activities, others need to invest some time and effort in assisting when open questions are raised by others. In this team, the team members clearly acknowledged each other’s willingness to help. In the words of one team member, “They didn’t limit themselves just to what they were asked for… So they were asking me, come on, I mean, if you need help just ask me. I will be there, just send me something, I will work with that. So we were, really, always available, always kind, they worked even for tasks that they were not supposed to fulfill.” (Interview: Angelina)

Team members described their meetings as a good possibility to find out what difficulties the others were facing and also ways to help. In Mathias’s own words, “Each of us worked on a topic. [In the meetings we] see: where are rising problems? Are we all on the same page? Where can we help each other until next week?” (Interview: Mathias) For example, at one meeting observed in the middle of the business policy analysis phase, Marcus experienced difficulties in how to frame his macro analysis, the so-called “PESTEL” analysis, standing for “Political, Economic, Social, and Technological” analysis. Team members joined in the effort to resolve his problem and started to discuss it. Mathias, in particular, was the one who gave him a “leg up”. This member linked various subparts and came up with a proposal as to how Marcus should organize his macro-analysis.

Marcus: “I am not sure about my part. What should I present? You are saying

something about quantitative, there are some qualitative data. That is also in my part, no? To analyze the economic system?”

Ina: “Probably it makes more sense to do secondary research because we did not do any interviews.”

Angelina: “Marie did one.” Ina: “Very general and so –“

Marcus: “But then again, to be honest, in a way it is impossible to research all elements for four, five regions. Usually when you do a PESTLE analysis you do it for one

country, right?” Ina: “Yes.”

Mathias: “Yeah, I mean, don’t we agree that would be too much, I mean, even in the paper you don’t want to have, like, PESTLE analyses for 10 different countries.” Marcus: “Not even in the paper.”

Mathias: “I don’t know, for the presentation, I mean for my part, I can do, like, a slide on the five forces and I can do a slide on this…”

Anna: “…Criteria?”

Mathias: “Yes, criteria, and at the end of this criteria put, like, a few countries which we say okay, those might be interesting; and then you take over, for example, with PESTLE and you try to identify a few factors which might be, like, applicable to all of those countries or globally, or like, I mean, you can talk about recession or you can talk about wine consumption, I don’t know what, like more people are drinking at home than in restaurants, and then if you feel like those countries which we came up with, like, some of them have, like, a very specific aspect in one of the PESTLE factors; then you can pinpoint that.”

Marcus: “Okay”.

Mathias: “For example, Russia, which might be a very important country, you could, like, do the PESTLE a bit more towards Russia, you know, and you have to customize it somehow.”

(Observation of team meeting: 27. 02. 2009)

To engage in the team’s problem-solving efforts presupposes an active, collective listening among team members (Hargadon & Bechky, 2006) which acted as a basis for helping to know what the problem was about. One team member even described this collective listening as a shared team value, “We all agreed on values of sharing information all the time, and we were prepared to listen to each other.” (Interview: Marie) She continued in the interview, “Everybody was very respectful all the time to what everybody was saying and we all listened to each other, and I think that the way

we get up to a decision was very rationally, so everybody was okay with it.” (Interview: Marie)

Although each member was assigned to individual tasks, these tasks were highly interdependent. When working on individual subtasks, team members appeared to know the overall project outline in the back of their minds and made use of synergies between each other’s work, for example, by scouting relevant project information. In one member’s own words, “If I had an interview with a person, I said that during the meeting, so everybody was aware of the fact that, for example, I was going to contact an CRM expert for that interview or my friend in Italy, or that I was contacting that kind of company even because maybe our team members were suggesting me the questions to ask. So it was absolutely necessary to talk about that during the meeting because maybe you could ask for other kinds of information that I didn’t need, but they need.” (Interview: Angelina)

Besides being supportive in the sense of scouting and sharing lots of project information among each other, members also received feedback from their peers. Members were highly open and willing to give advice on each other’s part. According to Marcus’s own words, “If someone needed help in his part, everyone would give an opinion on that. So I think we supported each other during the process.” (Interview: Marcus) Particularly Ina was the one in this team with challenging questions and advice. “In each session everybody talked about what one was doing and, well, Ina was maybe also challenging these, so that was the best feedback“ (Interview: Marie) acknowledged one member when recalling Ina’s provocative feedback which, in turn, stimulated an energetic exchange of ideas and arguments among the team members.