SELF Reflection Group Work

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.