Spring 2019
Collaboration Effort: Currently, I am working with two groups. The first group is considering a final paper in one of my classes. Basically, we have to go to visit a biomedical company as a whole and then we ask questions to complete the paper. So far, everything is organized, each person in the group knows what he/she supposes to do or ask. Also, everyone is collaborating. The second group is concerned with a UA club. We suppose to build a medical device. However, the project did not start yet. Hopefully, next week we are going to start the project. One of the most annoying problems that I faced during working in teams as an engineer that some members do not do their portion or they do not show up during the meetings and I find a hard time how should I tell them that they should attend and be active. By the end of this program, I hope that I can have the skill do not be shy and face these people.
Self Assessment: I got 73% on Goal setting, 86% on Relationship Building, 81% on Problem solving, and 77% on Active Listening. I know that I am bad at goal setting. This topic is hard for me to figure out particularly the goals that take the long-term to accomplish. I am surprised that I scored 86% on relationship building since I think I have a difficult time interacting with other people. Since English is my second language, I always put that as a block in building relationships. Nevertheless, the culture here is a bit different than in my home country. For problem-solving and active listening, I thought I will get more on these. I think myself as pretty good at problem-solving since I am an engineer. Maybe in the end I am not active listening since it related to the relationship building. Mostly, I want to improve relationship building and problem-solving.
Strengthening Relationships: I chose the option to go to a former team member and try to ask her questions about my conflict style. The conversation was odd in the beginning, to be honest with someone and at the same time, you do not want to hurt anybody's feelings. One important thing that my colleague told me is that most of the conflicts happen in the group, you try to solve these by abandoning your position. For instance, if the team in the early stages of planning and there is brainstorming, and it is the time to choose one idea, I do not care if my idea is not the chosen one, and I agree with anything the team says. My colleague suggested a strategy to solve this issue. Basically, if I think my idea should be the one, I should share and explain my idea more to my team members since maybe they did not understand what I am trying to say. Moreover, I also have to understand and listen to their ideas. Maybe I did not understand what they are trying to say. For me, what my colleague told me about my situation is true, and I think her solution is the best to deal with such conflict.
Active Listening: active listening is a very important skill not only in teams but also in communication. By listening to people, you can understand them. I already know about attending behavior strategy, and I remember applying this strategy in multiple times. This is a reflection on how this strategy can increase the strength of relations among team members. The key points that I focus on in this strategy are: acknowledging speaker statements, summarizing points, and ask more questions on the speaker's topic. When I do these three things during a conversation, I notice that the speaker is ongoing on his/her topic, and starts to tell me more about his/her idea. Moreover, I give the impression that I am interested in the topic as a team member. Therefore, that member will value my skills as a teammate since people appreciate others who listen to them.
Group Goal Setting: I think goal setting is one of the most important tasks to do in a team. By goal setting, it helps to determine what the goals of this team and what is expected per a teammate as well as deadlines to finish these goals and who to finish different sub-tasks. In this way, we also decrease the chance of misunderstanding and therefore decrease the possibility of creating a conflict. Since I started studying at the university, I have worked on many projects. For some projects, we stuck in just thinking about ideas, and we keep discussing these ideas and never move on to the next step, which is planning to convert the idea into actions. For other projects, we just started working on the project without having goals and how we are planning to finish the project, which creates problems in the further path of that project. Currently, I am working on a project with a team. This project can be divided into two goals. The first goal is to visit a biomedical company, which is already done. The second goal is to write a report for this biomedical company. Nowadays, we are working on the second goal, and what we did is to split the work of the reports on the team members. Each one has picked his/her topic. Today, we just establish our deadline for the report; not the same the deadline as the instructor assigned. Therefore, we did not have any conflict so far. Each person knows what to do and when to do it, and that is exactly what the action plan worksheet states.