Group Management

21Feb12

“On Thursday, Beth took us to the staff kitchen and blindfolded one person while the rest of us were in teams of: instructing, place setting, clean up crew, and ingredient selection. Our mission was to cook a meal using ingredients that she brought. At the end, we all had to taste it.”

Focus:
The focus of the group varied. Definitely. Some people didn’t want to be there, some people didn’t want to participate, some people were participating. If something needed to be decided, it was either Beth or a part of the group. The entire group never made a decision together about anything. When Beth felt that Copa wasn’t performing well, she pulled him out, we didn’t decide that as a group. I felt that because Beth was constantly switching group members’ roles that we couldn’t establish a focus on the task. If we had constant roles, that would’ve helped accomplish our task better.
Another reason that I felt like we lacked focus was because the task was too small for as many group members we had. As if we had too many people trying to stuff their hand into a small pot.

Clarification:
For clarification, I felt that Beth gave us some instructions, but not enough. For example, at first it was Emily (I think), Mark and I who were supposed to be giving cooking instructions, but another student was also trying to give directions with us. (Which I’ll admit, I was doing later..) However, the other student didn’t realize that once he was done helping pick ingredients, so he was lacking clarification. I felt like we should’ve all been in the kitchen, clarified our roles, the task, and possibly came up with a plan of attack on how to accomplish it most efficiently.

The Mouse:
In my opinion, I feel like we had a lot of mouses. Again, the task was so small and yet we had so many group members I feel like it was somewhat impossible to avoid this happening. When I wasn’t instructing, I was standing off to the side, out of the way of the group members who were active. However, I didn’t experience a mouse when I was an active member of the instructing group. Maybe if we split into two cooking teams if we had two stoves available, we could’ve had less chance of having mice.

The Loud Mouth:
I feel like I may have been this person at times, but also other people in the group were. I feel like the dominate personalities came out and tried to rule. Beth tried to help, but it didn’t really work out so well.

The Written Record:
This principle is a little odd. However, nobody could decide if we were going to keep two eggs and pour out butter or add another egg. Eventually, the group had decided that we would add an additional egg. I overhead some other group members who were confused. We could’ve designated a person to keep notes.

Negative Feedback:
The only negative feedback I can recall is when Copa wasn’t performing well as the project manager and Beth pulled him and replaced him.

Positive Feedback:
To be honest, I can’t recall any positive feedback. Beth gave feedback after we completed the task, but I can’t remember if it was positive, constructive criticism, or negative.

Handling Failure:
We completed our task, not well, but we completed it. I guess our failure would’ve been in the taste. Which we could’ve delegated the ingredients team to fix by adding additional eggs or spices while we were cooking.

Handling Deadlock:
We experienced deadlock when we had too much butter vs. egg. Part of the group wanted to pour out the butter but the other part of the group wanted to add more eggs. We eventually decided that having a blindfolded person pour out hot butter would be even more challenging than having them crack more eggs.

Sign Post:
I think Beth actually provided a lot of this for us. We weren’t doing it on our own. Had we established a team leader, this would’ve helped.

Avoid Single Solutions:
I think this principle also applies to what I wrote with handling deadlock. The first solution wasn’t good enough, so someone added another, which we ultimately went with.

Active Communication:
I feel like because there was one person cooking and 3 (or more) people instructing the m, that there was a lot of confusion. Sometimes whenever, whoever was cooking, was confused, they typically asked for clarification so that follows the principle in that section.

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Tags: groups, n250, team building