For all discussions you are expected to post your answers to the discussion questions described below and AT LEAST ONE follow-up to one of your group member's posts. You can and are encouraged to post more than this requirement since we are hoping to create a dialog. As I mentioned earlier, our collective
experiences are one of the areas we as a group need to mine…as in gold mine! For more details with respect to the expectations in the posts, please review the syllabus and the scoring rubric, and reach out
to your instructor. 1. First, since we have all served on a team at one point or another, reflect upon a time in which you were on a team and the performance of the team was the best that you have experienced. Dissect the
situation and share with us both the situation and why it was your best experience. What details stand out for you? I have had the opportunity to work with several “great” teams over the years. This past year, I had the ever so challenging opportunity to complete a 500-level course Critical Assignment as a group project. As most of you know, and from my own experience, group projects, in educational settings, tend to bring out the worst in people. In the short time span of 8 weeks, our team saw its own internal challenges. People were sick, mismatched schedules, family emergencies, and traffic all played their parts. What really set this team apart, was the effortless communication and flexibility. In particular, there was a situation that came up for me where I was supposed to have an annotated bibliography for an article related to the final project. I got caught in a work situation that I was unable to get out of in time to meet with the team and go over each bibliography. I sent a text to the team to give them a heads up. Another team member responded asking for the article and they would do the write up for the group. We all treated each other with respect and empathy. The project itself was convoluted and a cost accounting challenge. Our team managed to split up the work into appropriate pieces, communicate effectively and efficiently, and come together cohesively to present a phenomenal final project. What stands out the most to me in this situation was the level of genuine interest, compassion, empathy, and cohesion of the group. We never met in person. We had a few online meetings to go over the pieces as we put them together. In the end, we received almost a 100% and a gleaming review from the professor as “one of the best projects” he has ever seen. 2. Contemplate an experience that was the worst for you. Dissect this situation as well and share with us the situation and what variables contributed to this being the least favorable.
The key here is to learn from what did not work and how you may be able to bring about a different outcome.
On the flip side, I have been a part of a team that seemed to be built upon pure toxic chaos. A few years ago, I went through a departmental move with work. Our entire department was moved under a separate governing umbrella. We moved from sales overseeing an administrative team to risk and compliance overseeing a team of analysts. It was the same people doing, pretty much, the same job with new management. The addition of this new management team immediately began to foster a significant amount of distrust amongst the analyst team. I felt disconnected and undervalued. There was
a lot of talking in circles about changes that needed to happen that never came about. There were title changes, job description changes, salary evaluations that all kept getting delayed with a toxic management team and a rotating door of upper compliance management. I eventually took the situation to Human Resources and they were “shocked” to hear how this was affecting our team. The company soon hired an outside manager for the new department. My challenge was that I held a lot of anger, distrust, and cynicism towards this new manager. It took me a long time to move past the toxicity
