UAA College of Business and Public Policy

Sharing Lessons Learned in the CIS A280 Classroom to Build Team Resilience Skills on the UAA Campus

Dr. Sandra Ehrlich Facilitates Interactive Teamwork & Collaboration Workshop in the College of  Engineering

On February 8, 2019, Dr. Sandra G. Ehrlich, Associate Professor of Management & Marketing in the College of Business & Public Policy facilitated a workshop, “Building Resilience to Manage Team Projects: 6 Tips to Success,” for 30 senior capstone students in the College of Engineering.

Collaboration Leads to Team Success. “Collaboration is essential to team success. Teamwork maximizes our strengths. By combining ideas and different ways of thinking, it leads to better solutions to produce better results. This process is heightened in complex projects,” Ehrlich said.

“The Civil Engineering teams are working with Anchorage-based clients. Therefore, my goal was to move the project teams through Tuckman’s forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning model quickly,” said Ehrlich.

Defining 6 Keys. “By breaking down essential team and collaborative learning techniques into six basic categories, the engineering project teams reflected on and tackled the following topics:

1. Which Direction Are We Heading? Seek Common Ground
2. Are We Aiming at the Same Target? Set Common Goals
3. How Does Your Part Fit into the Whole? Clarify Roles & Responsibilities
4. Are We Rowing in the Same Direction? Ensure Accountability
5. Are We Willing to Listen? Communicate Effectively
6. Are We Willing to Embrace Change? Build Trust & Resilience

Seeking Common Ground. “One of the first facilitated exercises was seeking common ground by defining team norms. By establishing ground rules, teams build bridges across differences,” she said.

“Writing explicit team norms facilitates team survival. This helped the engineering project teams recognize and address some of the problems they were facing in an engaging way,” Ehrlich said.

Clarifying Goals & Roles. “Interdependence and respect are keys to team success. We moved through the stages of the team process, from establishing clearly defined team goals, clarifying roles and responsibilities, ensuring accountability, communicating effectively, to building trust and resilience,” she said.

Holding Individuals Accountable. “Collaboration creates accountability. Individual contributions make a difference. Shared understanding & respect is critical to success. How a team makes decisions, assigns work, and holds members accountable determines whether or not the team will be successful,” said Ehrlich.

Building Resilience. “Teamwork is the backbone of resilience. You can’t have leadership without resilience. No one can inspire, motivate, and lead by giving up. It allows a team to deal with a major obstacle. It’s the ability to respond to hitting a wall by regrouping & running through it,” she said.

Earning Trust & Embracing Change. “In the end, trust is the currency of an effective team. Team members have to trust each other to achieve outstanding teamwork. By embracing change, teams remain flexible and adapt to changing conditions,” Ehrlich said.

Sharing Lessons Learned in the CIS A280 Classroom. “These six keys to build team resilience constitute our framework and foundation in the CIS A280—Managerial Communications—classroom,” she said.

“It was my honor and privilege to present best practices and lessons learned from the CBPP classroom to build team resilience skills on the UAA campus with our engineering faculty colleagues and students,” Ehrlich said.

Dr. Sandra G. Ehrlich, CFRE, is an Associate Professor of Management & Marketing in the College of Business & Public Policy. She is a Certified Fund Raising Executive, CFRE, the Alaska CFRE Ambassador, a certified Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP) Master Trainer, and a certified Team-Based Learning (TBL) Trainer-Consultant. Sandra serves on the CAFÉ Advisory Council and is the UAA CAFÉ Team-Based Learning Faculty Associate. One of 36 CFRE’s, in Alaska, Dr. Ehrlich has been an AFP member since 2001 and a CFRE since 2007. She is the AFP Alaska Chapter VP of Education, and the Board President of The Friends of Talkeetna Library. Awarded the “Outstanding Professional in Philanthropy” in 2018, Dr. Sandra Ehrlich is the CIS 280—Managerial Communications—Course Coordinator.