Team Communication Reflective Report

On October 13, 2016, I attended the Team Communication Workshop Part II: Handling Difficult People and Situations, presented by Dr. Joanna Wolfe from the Global Communication Center. It was a workshop about how to handle working on a group project with people who might be difficult to work with and how to deal with uncomfortable situations in a professional manner. Dr. Wolfe noted in the beginning that based on the research that she and other GCC staff have conducted, women and minorities in general tend to face problems especially in scenarios where another group member dominates the other group members and the group project in general. The workshop was interactive, so we were presented with different scenarios that we may face in our careers and asked to rate the different kinds of reactions based on how effective we …show more content…
Taking part in this workshop really made me pay more attention to the issues that may come up in my professional career as well as consider how I can improve my interpersonal skills as a whole. As an engineering major, I realize that I will be working in groups most of the time on important projects when I enter the workforce. This group project aspect of engineering is not really emphasized, as most of my courses are technical ones that are not yet project-based. One thing that particularly resonated with me was when Dr. Wolfe pointed out that on average, groups with women members tended to have a higher collective intelligence. I think that she made valid points as to why that is, and I was able to reflect a little bit about how I contribute to the groups that I have been in. In my past experiences, I have worked on engineering and design projects with groups of other students. The different components of strong collaboration style put some of what I learned from those experiences into words. In