My Experience of Working in a Consultancy Team

My experience of working in a consultancy team

Introduction:

Reflection generally refers to the process where an individual evaluates an event or experience to arrive at a deeper understanding of the incident(s) and its surroundings (McMillan and Weyers, 2013). In other simple terms based on own understanding, it is a tool that can be used to research one’s own experiences to understand the purpose of it and to use it constructively in future. In this reflective report I have attempted to reflect on my experience of working as a part of the consultancy team. The knowledge and skills acquired on areas like project management, team building, preparing presentations for the client, time management, group discussions and peer assessments through a lot of events and experiences with the team have been discussed further in detail.

My Experience:

I have tried to reflect my experience with the help of Tuckman’s lifecycle of teams and Kolb and Kolb’s learning model.

As West, (2012) states Individuals within a group seek out information about other team members, particularly their backgrounds and experience in the type of work that the team will undertake, I started merging with my team by getting to know about their previous work backgrounds and with the team building activities such as ‘the straw building exercise’. I also got the chance to know about the member profile through ‘the profiling exercise’. These activities were very helpful in enabling each member to know about the members in the team and was enabling us to sort out each other’s position in easier way. Initially there was a lot of confusions on how to proceed with a task and how to manage it as a team but team discussions and team building activities erased the gap between team members.

I felt the storming stage of my team when we were given the peer assessing exercises in which we had to choose a team member for 20% hike and one for 20% drop in performance scores. Initially there were few disagreements between team members but after analysis of each and every member’s skills and responsibilities there was a mutual understanding and the task was completed successfully. We had a conflict even during the performing stage and we had to travel through this storming stage again. As West (2012) says, a team might go back and forth the Tuckman’s lifecycle of teams revisiting the stages to deal with them gradually at different levels. For this conflict which has raised during performing we decided to follow a win-win strategy instead of a win-lose strategy and fairly dropped some per cent of performance score of the member who failed to put in equal efforts and gave that to members who took extra efforts.