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James A. Chatfield, Ohio State University Extension, Northeast District/Horticulture and Crop Science; Joseph F. Boggs, Gary Y. Gao, Erik A. Draper, Keith L. Smith, Barbara G. Ludwig, Stephen R. Baertsche, |
There are two questions that inevitably occur when a person considers becoming a member of a team. These are: How much time will be devoted to team activities? What will a team member give up in order to work on team projects?
This relates to the zero-sum idea that team activities will simply replace activities that were previously done individually and that teams will simply make life even more busy, complicated, and stressful.
This means that a team must be able to define how the team will make each person's job more fruitful and successful. A team must be able to show its members how "teamwork is its own reward."
In our case, the Buckeye Yard and Garden Line (BYGL) is an example of how we buttressed the altruistic impulses toward teamwork with the energy of synergy that teamwork provides. BYGL (Chatfield, et al., 1996) was started in 1993 as a weekly electronic newsletter for our team. Each week from April-October, team members from around the state meet by conference phone each Tuesday morning, discussing landscape and garden plant problems from their area.
A group of BYGL Writers then convenes on the conference call to decide which items should be written up that week. Over the next two days each writer completes his or her assigned items, and rotating BYGL senders and proofers construct, proof, and send out the overall BYGL in its fax, e-mail, and web (enhanced by over 20,000 fact sheet and 3,000 image links) versions.
The finished BYGL is a timely, professional newsletter that comes out every week and is used by diverse sources, including other Extension offices in Ohio and elsewhere, green industry and other horticultural professionals, Master Gardener Volunteers, consumers, and the media. The newsletter provides the wealth of the Ohio State University expertise emanating as an electronic newsletter from each OSU Extension office.
An important internal benefit of the BYGL is that contributors directly benefit from a weekly 90-minute interdisciplinary inservice, complete with clarifications, point counterpointing (Boggs and Chatfield, 1995), and the educational benefit of translating the spoken word into written information a highly important skill to be regularly honed by Extension professionals. It was once posed that we should try to imagine a world in which we are not truly sure of what we think until we have to write about it and that this is precisely the world in which we live.
The bottom line for Extension educators is as follows: Each BYGL contributor puts in an average of perhaps four hours a week on the BYGL. What do they get back? The most timely, useful, and heralded newsletter any of us have ever developed, available to a diverse clientele in every county. [See page 18 in this Special Circular for the 2001 BYGL evaluations; Stone, 2002.] Plus we benefit from a weekly 90-minute interactive, interdisciplinary inservice each week during the growing season. What do we have to give up to spend time on team activities? BYGL benefits make the question moot.