Building a Team…

Most people will tell that they love working in teams, that they get support from each other and encouragement to carry on, press forward so to speak.  Someone to help smooth the way when all they want to do is crawl into the big black hole of study.  This is exactly what happened last time when I worked as part of a group.

The paper was Integrative Accounting, a wonderful paper that talked not about measuring growth in monetary numbers, but the green issues that companies now face.  The offset for carbon credits, the development and support of communities and other charitable organisations.  During the course of this paper we were assigned to groups or teams of five to develop a report and presentation, much like we are doing now.  So here were five people who had never meet before and had to find common ground to work through the issues that we had been presented with. 

I was lucky as one of the ladies that had been assigned to my group I actual knew, not well, but I had done a few contact courses with her.  So I had some idea of her personality and her working style.  She in turn knew one of the others in the group quite well as it turned out, and knew that we would work well as team, but we really weren’t prepared for the other two team members, and thought that our core three would be able arrange most of the stuff that needed doing.  Boy, were we wrong! It was a large assignment with a very complex presentation. 

The first meeting was an eye opener, as one of the group disagreed with everything anyone said, it had to be her way or the highway.  Another just sat there not really joining in in any of the discussions.  She then admitted she had to leave 30 minutes after the meeting had started due family commitments and felt like she could not add any input as she was behind in her study, which she hoped to catch up with in the next week.  So our first meeting was a bit of wash out and did exactly accomplish anything in regards to the team structure or roles.  The only thing we all agreed on was the topic, and that was only because we had to submit it for approval.

The second meeting was a little better as the team member, who had disagreed with everyone, on the first occasion, was more agreeable this time around, and actually helped with really good suggestions as to team roles.  It turned out that she had just come from a difficult personal situation in which she had been made to feel undervalued and taken advantage of.  AS she said it had affected more than she appreciated, and that she hadn’t meant to let it affect her in her studies.  However the one with family comments was a no show and no one had heard from her.  The advice of our tutor was to continue to develop the team and the presentation, assign her a role and try to keep communicating with her via email.

Somehow in the end we got there (after several other meeting with missing team members), just the four of us as we found out much to our horrification that our missing fifth member had been subject to domestic violence.  None of us had thought to ask her if everything was okay, we just steam trolled ahead focusing on what we had to do, and not the personal development side of the group.  It taught us all a great lesson that not everything is what is seems.  She was able to join us for the presentation on the day, slightly battered and bruised, but very happy that despite her problems, we still included her in the presentation, and helped her through the day.  What it taught me is well we may work in a team; we need to be able to communicate with each other not just on professional/developmental basis, but also a personal level, not in-depth but nice level of personal awareness.