Reflective Piece on Group Work

Individual Reflection Piece

If I were to describe my experience of working in groups in the past  I would have to use  superlatives and unfortunately they’re mostly of the negative kind but always in the extreme.   When groups work they’re great  but when they don’t they can be extremely difficult and distressing to be a part of and that’s why I prefer to work alone and not depend on others.  I’m usually happy with the standard  of work I  produce on my own and I don’t have to count on others to produce it.  However, my experience with this group has really made me see the difference it can make to productivity and creativity when you get the right combination of people and personalities.  I know for sure I would never have been able to produce this project on my own so groups do encourage innovation and creativity but only if they’re efficient and effective.  I love the phrase often used to describe why businesses love groups because  ‘they are greater than the sum of their parts’ and that’s so true of this exercise for me.  

What made this experience so successful in my opinion for me was the horizontal power structure we had.  I know that the commonly held belief is that groups should have leaders but I don’t know whether I agree with that.    Nobody in our group was was labelled.  We were all equals and we all had an opportunity to wear  the ‘leaders’ hat.  It was such a great feeling to know that you could depend on your team members to pick up where you left off or where you fell short,  it felt like we were all very single minded and passionate about the task at hand and we all wanted to do well.  It was such a relief and very refreshing not to have had any power struggles or individual rivalry within the group between different people wanting to to be ‘in charge’.

I will admit thought that when we first met four weeks ago I was very worried about how the younger members would engage and accept me and at the same time I imagined what I would have thought at their age if I was forced to team up with a 50 year old woman and I thought I’d be scared and nervous that she’d be judgmental and critical so my first priority was to show them that I was not at all like that.  

I wanted to show them that I was not an ogre and was just as scared as they were about what lay ahead of us and I did this by talking a lot and letting them see ‘me’ and hopefully helping them cast off any preconceptions they might have had about me.  

I needn’t have worried within minutes of meeting we were all fighting for air time.  I was put at ease immediately and was happy to have started off on such a good footing.   I think we were very fortunate and I don’t know what made the team work so well, maybe it was  the personality mix or maybe it was  the common goal but it worked and I think it worked very well.  There’s no doubt about it but when groups work well there is a heady synergy created and what started off as an onerous task with an uphill mountain to suddenly became an enjoyable and fun task that I looked forward to engaging with.  There was great social and task cohesion and the latter at times may have been a double edged sword but I won’t talk about that here as its covered in the Group Process Report.