The Importance Of Swag Team 6

We are Swag Team 6, and it has been over two months since we were assigned our group. Significant progress was made in the duration of our formation, and within a short amount of time, the adversities we have overcame from where we began is impressive. As we came together initially, we were strangers from multiple different cultures with varying ideas and ways of going about our group. Our group was comprised of 3 Chinese students, and 3 American students. Nevertheless, even the Americans had varying cultures. Alongside the cultural shock, was the moment we realized our ages varied dramatically. Georgette, a 17 year old sophomore, impressed the group the most. The realization that she was only half the age of Mark, 34, was astonishing. The …show more content…
True to its testament, Swag Team 6 endured, and eventually overcame all of these stages. The forming stage initially began in the class on the 1st of September, when all the names were spoken and a primary tension was felt by all. Some tension we felt was because of the obvious language barrier and cultural differences that we expected to encounter. Mark’s absence on the first day of formation did not help with the situation. How would the group function with a language barrier? Would the varying context culture hinder the growth of the team be minimal or critical? Would Mark be able to fit in and adapt with the group environment that was already strongly established? These questions wouldn’t be answered at the beginning, but rather throughout the entire …show more content…
For the most part, this was the first experience of any kind of group meeting that anyone of us has had, and thus we all lacked essential knowledge on how to conduct a meeting and made it severely inefficient. On one hand, we experienced one of our first stumbles, a secondary tension, that may have been because of a task (simple) conflict. On the other hand, we began to build trust amongst the five of us, which would allow us to develop a sense of belonging. Initially, this meeting had no clear goal, and more indirectly turned it into us getting a “feeling” of each other out. At this point, we were dropped into the storming stage. We did not have a clear consensus on what specific volunteer activity we would end up participating in, even though the entire goal was to decide on a volunteer activity. To manage the conflict, we focused on our common goal and decided to postpone the decision-making to the next meeting. As unproductive as that sounds, the first meeting helped us navigate how to interact with one another to directly reach a point. Our group climate was very supportive and everyone was willing to communicate with each other and share their ideas. In addition, we established our team rules and norms that allowed no Chinese to be spoken during the meeting and everyone was expected to be on time to all the meetings, and at the very least communicate with the group and show