Team Progress

Currently I am working within two groups--my service project team for this class and my business team from my entrepreneurship class--and both groups are or have recently underwent the forming and storming stages.

So far I feel that forming has gone well in both groups. As fellow students, it's been nice that we all have similar purposes and aims for participating and succeeding together, and from that foundation getting to know each other and learning about each of our different strengths has been fairly easy. What has really helped me to get to know my teammates has been my respect and courtesy towards them, and just trying to accelerate the getting to know them process by looking for ways to complement and/or appreciate them. It's odd, but I probably would never have tried to get to know any of my teammates and would never have realized how excellent they are had we not been thrown at such projects together.

The storming stage occurred in both of my teams as well as we tossed around ideas for our projects. In the past, I know I've been far too critical of other's ideas, but having realized my error, I consciously decided to encourage every idea that was voiced and in the end we were able to agree on an idea that we all were excited about. However, storming wasn't over after that point because the next thing to do was to work out the small details. This stage is admittedly harder for me because I am a perfectionist and the little details and choices can seem to mean the world to me at times. I wouldn't say that I did great during our detail planning, however I think we were able to weather the storming because we had first laid a solid foundation during forming.

I've seen mainly one dysfunctions in my business team so far, that of avoidance of accountability. Particularly, there have been several assignments given out, however there has been a lack of progress reports and I find myself needing to ask how the assignments are coming along, which has been slightly difficult because the Fear of Conflict dysfunction seems to be at work as well. Anyways, I will solve this problem by turning the tables and teaching accountability by example; every time we get together for a meeting I will begin by reporting on the assignments I was supposed to do and then give everyone else an opportunity to do the same and be happy about what they accomplished for the team. If this method doesn't work I will explicitly inform everyone of the importance of accountability and then ask them to voluntarily report on their assignments in the future so we can achieve the benefits of accountability.

Wish me Luck :)