Thoughts after taking online teambuilding training

I just finished an Accenture internal online training called "Cultivating a High-performance Project Team: Building a High-performance Team". There are some new concepts that differs significantly from my previous understanding.

In traditional Chinese culture, the "art of leading" is to keep the everyone in team "balanced", the best leader is the one who can keep the "harmony" of the team. Every since China opened it's door to the the outside world. The westernized influence swept China. Many private new companies adopt the westernized management philosophy since the early 80's. Promoting competition within employee, rewarding individual contribution and etc become popular buzz words used in modern enterprise management.

By completing the training, some of my views about how to create an successful team changed. In this training, it doesn't recommend severe competition between team members, because that "break" the team. When prizing individual contribution, it suggests do it one-on-one. My guess that avoids unnecessary jealousy among team member which can negatively impact team culture. It also said for upper managment should emphasize and reward team achievement rather than individual success.

Majority of the training are agreeable to what I already knew. Couple things that are different, such as, team manager should try to resolve team members' conflict. In modern China, if there is a conflict between two employee, boss would just say: "deal with it, or you both can get fired". It is not a common practice for lead to get involved in team member's conflict, because they think that will just make things become more complicated. What was taught in this course is more aligned with the traditional Chinese management method, which is lead supposes to maintain the harmony among his subordinates in every way.

The training also explained about the importance of informal processes and foster of feeling of inclusion, devotion, dedication, pride and trust among team to further improve team performance.