Maixia Xiong CTP #3

I can imagine what my perfect team would look like. I could talk to you about the roles and duties of each team member and how they are important to our common goal. However, what was striking from this week’s reading is that it is more likely that poor communication can threaten businesses more than competition or the economy (Managing Groups and Teams/Communication, en.wikibooks.org). I believe this is true not only for businesses but of any group or team. 

Now I would not say that this was the worst group experience I have ever had. However, it is the freshest and the one with the heaviest impact so far. Early in the summer my friend invited me to join her planning committee for a retreat that had been in the talks since the beginning of the year. I gladly agreed under the assumption that by this point she was at a recruitment stage for helpers to assist in activities. I was wrong. Not only were the two heads of the planning committee not agreeing on a common goal any more but they were also no longer on good speaking terms. One of them had withdrawn (in a sense that they felt that their input was no longer valuable) from the group. 

With the date of the retreat on the horizon, a lot of information gathering, mediation, and reinforcement had to happen in order to follow through with the scheduled event (refer to the Alverno College Reaching Decisions and Completing Tasks Framework, no url available). Fortunately I was not the only one brought in at this point. With new additions to the team we quickly put our heads together. Even so, the norms that we had and the communication we lacked because of these norms did not help to make the planning any better. 

For example, in our culture we respect those who are older than us and give them authority. In our case, a younger more experienced team member took the lead on an area we were struggling with. But before we had established this norm, the age-respect norm still stood in the way. It was this holding on to a cultural norm that restricted a team member from speaking up and taking action. 

I have definitely learned that when working with comrades, our cultural norms and our established norms as friends cannot get in the way of the norms we need to create. All in all, the retreat took place as scheduled. Was it a good retreat? Yes. Could it have been better? Definitely yes. We all walked away from this experience with different feelings but we all agreed on one thing. This was a grand learning experience for all of us.

I learned that even with all the right players in place, if we did not talk to one another and reach decisions on even the smallest things, then our ultimate goal would be hard to reach. Not only did our team morale fall to a place it should not have gone but it also poured over into the larger community we were trying to serve. Perhaps this was the kind of conflict we needed to realize the skills we had and the ones we still needed.