Self-reflection and Growing-Up Experience Tour by Sissi YAN Xin (52731795)

                                                                         

Self-reflection and Growing-Up Experience Tour by Sissi YAN Xin J

Through the study of High Performance Collaborations course, I experienced a different study tour and I would like to share my experience and reflect about the whole process working with my teammates and the virtual team members here.

I will use the Team Development Process Model (Figure 1) to give a clear description and analysis of my learning experience.

    Figure 1 Team Development Process Model

As the Model showed, the first stage is forming. In this stage, team forms and team members have the original knowledge and impressions about each other. And we exchanged our background information, like countries we are from, programmes we are studying and some basic information, such as email addresses, phone numbers etc. And we named our team name----Pyracle and formed team’s logo that containing all our expected collaboration’s meaning and wishes.

My behavior/commitments: I took the initiative to join them and gave the idea of our team name and logo----Pyracle combining of the good meaning of Pyramid and Circle to imply a good collaboration among us.

During the storming stage, we got further opportunities to know each other, the style of behaving, talking and thinking through the collaboration of the first blog. We mainly discussed the content and framework of the blog and how to allocate each other’s work and reached a consensus about these things mainly through face-to-face, emails and messages occasionally.

My behavior/commitments: I both listened to my teammates’ and exchanged my ideas actively. Put efforts into blog 1 and prepared the presentation mindfully.

Conflicts came out: it mainly performed as the constructive conflict since we were still in the stage to get familiar with each other and adjust each to the collaboration. So we presented more respect on others’ ideas while retaining each’s opinion. The main challenge of the conflict was that it took us a little more time to make decisions. But it was not a big issue as we got more familiar with each other’ s way of thinking and behaving, we could discuss more directly and openly without any barriers.  

The third stage is norming, we formed relatively accepted ground rules and kept contact always and focus on common purposes and objectives. And we were all working actively on our final project and after several times exchanging ideas, finally we came up with the current virtual.com----the CDC.com focusing on the corporation between a consulting company and students mainly from CityU.

Inter-team collaboration with the evening class began from this stage. We communicated mainly through emails and skype for several times. And we discussed fiercely about the final project----what we would present and what time we would discussion.

My behavior/commitments: I hoped the Inter-team collaboration could reach a good ending just as the intra-team collaboration, so I kept consistence to keep contact with all team members and let my ideas known and meanwhile got to know others’.

Conflicts: three main conflicts among inter-team collaboration like time arrangement for meeting, different ideas attacking, and all these resulting in a lot of emails to deliver and classify different information and opinions in order to get the common ideas and support for the final project.We did take a long time to make the final decision with a lot of electronic brainstorming.

Performing stage, the mature period: High commitments were put to achieve the final goals, and working on the final project positively and share information and materials regularly as the common idea has been decided. Positively worked together and almost everyone kept consistent during the collaboration.

The problem is no feedback between inter-teams after the project, just let it finished.

Conclusions:

Several things I learned from the collaborations:

Mutual respect and trust is the root of collaboration and we made decisions based on it. Through mutual respect and trust, we can share our information and exchange our ideas open and freely, meanwhile enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of the collaborations which corresponded with the original intention of High Performance collaborations.

Active listening (Figure 2) is important for each stage of our collaboration and actually it was the part that we did very well as we could not only grasp others’ opinions actively, but also could give a response and show interest and also evaluate these opinions positively. Thus it was helpful and beneficial for our collaboration.

Figure 2 Active listening Process and Strategies Model

Open mind was necessary always since it could help us overcome some obstacles and face problems or adverse situations positively and find ways to solve problems.

Communication positively is the key to success and the way we communicate decided the outcome of our collaborations. And the communication technology also influenced the efficiency of our communication. For example, sometimes we could not reply emails immediately, so this to some degree has weakened the sufficiency of our communication, while sometimes we used messages which can quickly deliver the information which we wanted others to know. But no matter what technology we has used, we must try to let others know our opinions and also let them know that I was caring about the collaboration with you and I also had faith to do the project with you!  

Let voice heard: if you don’t say, others will never know what in your mind! So be always willing to speak out your words and involved in the whole process proactively is helpful not only for the whole project’s development, but also is beneficial to one’s growth!

Just as Henry Ford said “Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success.” Thank you for my professor and all my team members’ help and kindly advice at the proper time, it’s a nice journey to meet you and collaborate with you!

References:

"Reflective writing" and "High Performance Teams"by class handout.

McShane/Von Glinow, Organizatioanl Behavior: Emerging Knowledge and Practice for the Real World,5th edition.p.258-259, p.286-287.