Extreme group dynamics
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At my project manager course we have learned much about how group dynamics affect team performance. The gist of it is that everyone needs to be understood as well as represented within the group for them to enjoy their work and thereby produce better results. This is primarily achieved through communication, although the ways of communicating can be vastly different. A usual way to spark conversation is doing team building exercises (hence the name). These include games, fikas, lovemaking etc. I chose to take my group out on a nice Sunday stroll to Högklint and back, a total of 17 km. We set out on the journey before lunch, it was cloudy but in a rare act of mercy by god there was no wind. One member of the team had sat up programming all night and couldn’t join us which kind of defeated the point of the exercise but it was fun anyway. During the trip we talked about many personal things and got to know one another on a whole new level. Not that level. Our team was already very close, so it may have seemed unnecessary to “waste” a day walking. However, there is always much we don’t know about each other and to become a really motivated team there needs to be more communication than just professional pleasantries. In this case, the end result was satisfactory. We are stronger as a team and feel like our work is flowing even better now. I will arrange more of these sorts of things in the future, ensuring that we get our hermit programmer out as well. Group dynamics may seem a bit unclear, both in supposed results and practice. However, for what it’s worth my group really benefited from it in our project as we now have an easier time separating work from personal chat. We just needed to mark different occasions for them, and suddenly concentration rose sharply. This is something I can recommend to any project manager that wants to boost team performance and really get to know the people they meet every day.  |
(Note: comparatively super serious and tasteless)
