Over the course of this program
I have learned a lot about working on teams.
At first, I groaned about this as I had my own assumptions as to how it
work or not work. Instead of looking at
the positive I focused on the negative aspects of team work. For every team I
have been a part of I had no real issues other than dealing with a very aggressive
member in one class and a lack of participation from two members in another
class. These experiences have actually
taught me about group dynamics and how to better work with teams. This is the
first group where we have had 5 members. I feel that this could be an advantage
but it could also hinder us. Too many members could cause more conflict; too
few members could lack the needed cohesion for the team to succeed.
Most of us have worked together
on the same team prior to this class so we knew from the start that we would be
successful because we have learned to communicate well. One of the things that have
helped us to complete our task is to be active in the group discussion
board. This means checking in every
couple of days, asking questions, providing help where it is needed. This gives
accountability to each member and if we have to nudge the other members we can
do it in a constructive way. We all seem to have the same thoughts on
expectations and what we expect from our learning experiences here. Of course
there is advantage to having some of your team members in the same
building! I can walk over to the other
members and throw out thoughts and get real time feedback from them.
With any group there will be
times where someone doesn’t agree with what the lead person has in mind and
even with communication on the discussion board, the message can get lost as
tone cannot be conveyed through here. Everyone approaches decision-making or
problem-solving differently so it is important that we try to avoid conflict if
possible. However if that is not possible we must be able to manage conflict
constructively by using compromising and integrating styles. The charter is
pretty straight forward and there are not really any factors that inhibit the
process or time needed to get it done.
Everyone submitted their parts pretty quickly as we have all done this
in previous classes.
As a team we are all on the
same page with how we share information which is mostly through the discussion
board with email follow up as needed. A
few of us have already taken the lead on projects we want to do for the class
so we are off to a great start. At this
point there are no real issues with authority or power that would affect our
team. It is possible that it may happen
in some of the later projects however I feel confident that we will be able to
work through those issues and remain cohesive.
As a team reading over the charter I can see that we will be able to
collaborate well in order to influence a great outcome to our projects. I do think that it would be interesting to
ask these types of questions in some of the other projects that are more time
consuming and more detail oriented where the chances of conflict and
competition will most likely occur. This way we could get a better idea of different
challenges there are and how we dealt with differences and still managed to get
the project done in a timely manner.
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