Team Membership [was Does your community clean all the common areas yourselves? - cautionary tale | <– Date –> <– Thread –> |
From: Sharon Villines (sharonsharonvillines.com) | |
Date: Thu, 4 Oct 2018 11:28:32 -0700 (PDT) |
> On Oct 4, 2018, at 9:56 AM, Alan O'Hashi via Cohousing-L <cohousing-l [at] > cohousing.org> wrote: > Since the "work" now is sitting in meetings, there tends to be static > membership on teams without much rotation and thus, no room for new members. A few years ago one of our members suggested that we do a random assignment to teams — shake them up and bring new perspectives. At the time I thought she was crazy and had no idea how much information is stored in the team members' heads or how hard it was to learn everything the team knew —what had or hadn’t worked and why, when this was done or that, what went wrong when we forgot to do this, etc.? Who do you call for this? But for some teams — not my own of course — I thought it would be a good idea. Like attracts like, and the purpose of the team comes to be defined by the abilities and interests of its members, not the needs or wants of the community. Team members, reasonably, would say that sounds good but none of us wants to do it. I became an advocate of at least randomly assigning new members and ones who were not currently active to a team. Give them their choice if they have one but then assign. Then we began getting many new members, and the new members have been more engaged than those who left. Some very engaged members left also, but the energy of the new people is pretty astounding. They also brought new perspectives from their various career and personal interests. Best of all, I’ve learned that one new person on a team and in a community can entirely change points of view in specific areas. Sometimes they have new knowledge that fills a gap or fixes a problem, other times because they bring new energy. And each new person has a grace period of about a year when they can do no wrong. (Except putting the dishes in the kitchen in the wrong place.) Sharon ---- Sharon Villines Takoma Village Cohousing, Washington DC http://www.takomavillage.org
-
Re: Does your community clean all the common areas yourselves? - cautionary tale Alan O'Hashi, October 4 2018
- Re: Does your community clean all the common areas yourselves? - cautionary tale Diane, October 4 2018
-
Re: Does your community clean all the common areas yourselves? - cautionary tale Ann Lehman, October 4 2018
- Re: Does your community clean all the common areas yourselves? - cautionary tale Alan O'Hashi, October 4 2018
- Team Membership [was Does your community clean all the common areas yourselves? - cautionary tale Sharon Villines, October 4 2018
Results generated by Tiger Technologies Web hosting using MHonArc.