Group Reflection Paper

There 's A Lot of Difference Between Listening and Hearing Over the course of working on this semester long project with my group I have learned that my views regarding how I believed the team would function were inaccurate and have changed due to not aligning with how the group actually functioned. Tuckman’s stages of team development are very evident in our group as everyone was initially very open and energetic regarding the project, however very quickly we progressed into storming. The speed at which the dynamic of the group changed leaves me in awe looking back and curious as to how we accomplished anything. A few of the things I have learned from working in a group is that not all voices are heard the same way, there is more alienation …show more content…
On the first day that we worked together we all seemed to be working fine. We adopted the democratic leadership approach which was perfectly acceptable to me as it was the leadership role I was most comfortable with and believed to be the most effective coming into the group. When we all agreed upon the democratic leadership style I believe we were still in the forming phase. None of us were overly eager to leave the group meeting or seemed distraught to be having to do this. In fact some of us were excited to work on the project and get to know each other better. This phase however only lasted for part of the first meeting. Quickly we had already progressed to the storming phase. Everyone was coming up with different ideas and the group was unable to come to conclusions for even the simplest decisions. As the ideas were rehashed and remade to better fit …show more content…
From this point on there was a clear subdivision in the group of those whose ideas were implemented and those whose were not. This became troublesome as when new ideas were proposed the group from which they were coming were very supportive while the other seemed to be listening but not caring. A quote by Criss Jami sums it up perfectly, “It 's not at all hard to understand a person; it 's only hard to listen without bias.” There now was a bias in the group which made communicating essentially impossible. The ideas were agreed upon eventually, however the group coming up with them received some aid from the other group, but primarily had to accomplish all the necessary tasks for it themselves. At one point myself and another member of the group have to go to various boutiques to research the prices of dresses as we were not able to get a solid answer from the other group of what the market price of these dresses were. There were times when the group seemed to be in the norming phase, however slight differences always caused us to revert to storming. Personally I believe the biggest flaw was the democratic leadership style, although I still consider it to be highly effective I