Understanding our individual spheres of influence on teams is critical in seeing how to advance team efforts and goals. However, as individuals, we often fail to see the true potential of our connective potential as we connect with our team members and constituents. In the education and training of teams, explicitly teaching a team to reflect on their sphere of influence for advancing the project goals and developing their self-awareness helps team members to further develop awareness of their impact on team dynamics as well as their ability to bring knowledge from other areas of their lives and past experiences into the team’s efforts. Literature has well established the importance of individuals’ connective potential (Kadushin, 2012; Long, Cunningham, & Braithwaite, 2013) and the power that comes from serving as a connection between network nodes (i.e., boundary spanners), including increased social capital (Burt, 2004; Hill, 2020, 2023; Lin, 2002). The goal of this session is to provide participants with the means to deeply examine their spheres of influence and boundary-spanning behaviors, discuss their connective potential with colleagues, and apply their increased insight to team dynamics through the SEER Process as designed by the SEER Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. By developing their sphere of influence and boundary-spanning behaviors, the session will enable the next generation of researchers and practitioners to more effectively work in teams and advance team science goals.

In this session, we will first introduce participants to the SEER Process, including its literature foundations and practical applications for team science. The process consists of four components that help change agents and projects better See change problems within larger system dynamics, Enact informed and collaborative actions, Evaluate the success of interventions, and Revisit goals, actions, and evaluation strategies. The process is rooted in literature on organizational theory (Manning, 2017), systems theory (Kania et al., 2018), network connectivity (Kadushin, 2012), and transformative learning (Mezirow, 1991).

Audience will then be introduced to an activity that is part of the “seeing” stage of the SEER Process. This exercise may help a team to further envision how to bring more of their whole selves into a project for synergistic impact. We will provide an activity handout including four components: (1) a network mapping exercise using a handout that identifies team memes and campus constituents; (2) prompts for small groups to share, discuss, and expand their visualization of connections in which they might have influence; (3) an exercise for individuals to add details about the types of connections they have, both current and potential, and examine how their connections (could) result in bidirectional influence; and (4) prompts for teams to again break into small groups to explain, using their network map, their sphere of influence and where they could individually and collectively leverage said influence towards advancing team goals. The activity will end with a conclusion about how the activity helps individuals better “see” their spheres of influence as team members and implications for enacting, evaluating, and revisiting team cohesiveness and processes.