Self-Reflection
Reflecting back on the group work for the work and Employment module, I feel that I have
benefited drastically in terms of teamwork skills and have managed to accomplish many
achievements as well as found that there were many improvements which could have been
made.
One of the biggest difÏculties my group faced was time management and being able to
gather all members of the group together, due to other commitments. However we soon
managed to overcome this as we discovered in order to successfully complete the task we
would have to put more effort in and work on our communication skills. Despite not being
able to meet up as regularly as we liked we decided to communicate via a WhatsApp group,
this allowed flexibility and even worked in our favour as we were able to share interesting
research we came across instantaneously. If I had to approach this task again I would make
sure that the dates for meetings were set in the beginning. This would mean meetings
would always occur despite some members not being present, allowing the group to
progress and work more efÏciently.
Furthermore due to our group continuously engaging we sometimes struggled to stay on
task and the conversation happened to stray from our assignment this was especially
prevalent in the ‘forming’ stage of the group as described by Tuckman (1965) cited in
Cameron (2009a) where our group was the most unproductive. This was soon resolved after
we assigned each member with a task to complete for the following meeting. We decided to
not allocate a leader and to equally share responsibility. Initially I found this approach to
work well as it meant we all had an equal input. However, in future group work tasks I
would insist that a team leader was set so that they would be able to delegate tasks
accordingly and make sure the group remained focused.
Many disagreements and differences in opinions arose when deciding on our main
argument points. Cameron (2009b) describes conflict within a group to be “better viewed
as a phenomenon to be explored rather than a threat”. I strongly agree as I feel that the
difference in opinion only allowed the group to thoroughly analyse the task and create a
rigorous argument.
The biggest challenge I faced personally was presenting to a big audience. Although in
general, I feel like I am a confident and outgoing person, I can feel very intimidated when
standing in front of an audience. However, after much practice with my group in front of
others, I became more comfortable with speaking aloud.
On the whole I am very content with the quality of the work which was produced by my
group and I feel as a whole we worked harmoniously despite a lack of team leadership and
time management issues. I feel that personally I have benefited significantly from this task
as it has highlighted my strengths and weaknesses and has also prepared me on how to
approach future group work.