Friday, July 16, 2010

A Successful Group


Consists of a/an:
· Controller (Alisha Kumar)
The Idea Generator. She keeps her mind set on the big picture, the final product. She’s strong, and motivated, soft inside but she won’t ever show it. She keeps the group under control and separates facts from feelings.

· Persuader (Jacqueline Lares)
The Idea Promoter. I give away trust. I’m positive, optimistic, intuitive, and I provide energy with a smile. I’m impulsive, yet flexible. I give people hugs when they need them and convince people I know exactly what I’m talking about.

· Stabilizer (Elsa Lee)
The Idea Fulfiller. You can never have too many stabilizers. She avoids conflict, at all costs. She loves prepositions. Around, through, under, behind, anything to avoid problems. Her biggest strength lies in networking.

· Analyzer (Julian Rosow)
Quality Control. He’s the system task, he works with quality, accuracy, and perfection. He’s thorough, comprehensive and complete. He is his work. He’s a perfectionist and everything he does, he does right. He won’t fight unless he can back himself up.

Any team that doesn’t have a controller, persuader, stabilizer, and analyzer is doomed to fail in the long run.

We can now label ourselves as a successful group. I’m so proud of us. I know the first group project, we were slightly dysfunctional and we completely fell apart under pressure, but this time we pulled it off calmly, maturely, and successfully. We watched as surrounding groups got into arguments and continued to work together. There was trust, comfort, communication, and productivity.

The video we watched in class today revealed so much about our group. How we work and why we work that way. Either one of us has the ability to portray any of the four behavioral styles. We are all four styles, but we’re most comfortable with our dominant style. We have more energy when we’re in our comfort zone. If we step out of our comfort zone into another behavioral style, it’s difficult, and draining, but knowing how each one of us works has helped us work with each other. We know each other’s strengths and weaknesses and we have developed the ability to work around them, no problem. We’re all calm, we’re all happy, and most importantly, we’re all so proud of our final project. There were no “I did everything, you didn’t do anything” issues, the work was all really divided incredibly well.

That’s what I wanted to post yesterday. Today I just proved myself right even more. We edited together, we went through a revision together, and we turned in our group report early and on time. After that, I went to the Cornell Store and then I felt like I really needed a relaxing walk. I had to take in my last few steps on the campus. I thought about everything and somehow I started to feel like a huge weight had been lifted off of my shoulders.

I went inside the chapel, just to check it out. It was really nice. It was relaxing, calming, I really needed to do that before leaving tomorrow. After that I went to the library where I bought myself a Chai Tea and just walked around exploring while the rain outside calmed down. Then I met up with Kelsey and Evan for lunch. We walked around calmly, came back to our dorms and relaxed. I took a nap for a couple of hours before going to dinner with a few people, we had Japanese food in downtown Ithaca. Then we came back and watched the talent show, and then waited downstairs in the common room until they closed it a couple of minutes ago. I’m really tired now, but I want to post a picture of part of our group in progress. The picture is me, Alisha to my left, Elsa in front of me, and the boy with the slightly orange hair is Tucker. He isn’t in our group, but he’s a lovable person who makes my days here at Cornell. Julian wasn’t in this picture because he was behind the lens. He’s a talented visual designer.
I’m going to sleep now, we’re going to wake up tomorrow morning and get ready for our graduation. I thought we were going to check out pretty early, but my roommate Katie didn’t sign us up until 12 PM. At least this gives us a little more time to sleep and get ready for graduation. I also need to call my mom in the morning, she sent me a text message now but I’ll make sure to call her in the morning. I miss her, I miss everyone back home now. I’m going to miss everyone here too, but I’m definitely ready to sleep in my own bed again. California, here we come.

2 comments:

  1. Jacky,

    Sounds like you all this ‘team’ concept figured out. Our Brown-II group is studying this very subject even as you’re reading this.

    Personally, my idea of teamwork has always been that I would be in charge, do all of the work and the rest of the team would sit back and take the credit. Sometimes I might get them to clean up afterwards but not always. Lately I’ve been trying it your way but I still have some trust issues.

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