Being in a team as diverse as ours, with members from four different nationalities, the importance of interpersonal communication (cultural differences coming into play) is very high. Language – as far as our group is concerned – is not a big problem as all group members are comfortable with English. This saves us a lot of headache as translations are a primary reason for miscommunication. Even with all of us knowing a common language, there were problems initially, especially due to different pronunciations. This difficulty eased out once we got to know and understand each other’s accent better. Let it be me or my team-mates, we made sure that we clarified anything and everything we couldn’t hear or understand properly when someone else is talking. Repeating a sentence or two may seem tedious, irritating and like a waste of time. Believe me; clarifying doubtful things then and there is way better than understanding things differently, causing bigger problems down the line.
A self-driven team is always more successful. Ours is one of them! I have noticed on many occasions that each of us is willing to take up that extra bit of responsibility. Having done our homework research, all of us came well prepared for the meeting. This helps us save a lot of precious time and energy and we could concentrate on our next best steps and a probable agenda for the next meeting and more importantly, scheduling the next meeting.
All of us understood other team members’ constraints. This was evident when we were choosing time slots for the next meeting. None of the team members were placed under undue pressure and eventually we came up with a slot convenient for all of us. Personally, I had that sense of assurance from my teammates and this helped me bond with them better.
The fact that we were able to converge on many things quite easily like division of responsibility for the project, order of speakers for the oral presentation showed that we were moving on in the right direction as far as our team spirit and cohesiveness is concerned. Things which may seem trivial, like backgrounds and fonts for the presentation, are usually issues that are a pain. I am glad we were able to move over those quickly.
Our communications so far have been strictly professional. Taking that extra bit of effort to know team members more personally would improve our synergy and ultimately the quality of work we produce. What about becoming friends on Facebook?
Punctuality is another crucial factor which determines output. As most of our meetings are short and crisp it really helps when people are on time. I regret being late on one occasion when I messed up the location of our meeting point. I’ll make sure I am on time for the rest of our meetings and would really appreciate the same from all of us.
Like everyone else, we have our flaws and I can assure that we are working our way, rapidly, to becoming THE team!
Lakshmi Narasimhan
I entirely agree that going that extra mile to know your group members is the next logical step to improving interpersonal communications :D
ReplyDeleteI have a suggestion for the entire tutorial group -
How about we all be one big group within the tutorial? I would really like to get to know everybody, and make friends! Lets not just stop at being acquaintances, cause, that would make for a very boring 2x2 hours per week for the rest of the semester D: And we can all help each other our, as members of this big group :D
I strongly agree with you that we should go further from colleagues to friends during the process of teamwork. It is really good to make good friends, specially from so different cultural backgrounds. We can learn a lot of cultural knowledge from each of us. This is much better than learning from books, TVs and the Internet. Moreover, to be friends is good for our team job. We will have a easier working environment, like a home. The efficiency will be much higher than we focus only on the tasks. There is a story. When Germany occupied Switzerland during World War II, the watch manufactories were forced to produce watch for German army. However, no matter how much effort the workers made, they could not produce top watches. Thus, let's make our atmosphere more lively and easy.
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