the VALUE of relationships in team projects…
As the semester is coming to an end, we all are involved in many different team projects. I have had two other team projects that I just recently completed and it was almost comical to compare them to our team in this class. As I have said before, I have never been on a team for a group project which requires so much collaboration, and so much interaction. The same thing can be said in our class. I have never been in a class when I knew every single persons name and actually cared about their performance in the class, not just my own.
One project in particular really made me think about the system that Providence College, and many other colleges have in place. The group consisted of six people. I can honestly say that I did not know the names of 3 of them people until we came to the end of our project. Also, I think I had only interacted with 2 of them before in my whole career at Providence College, even though I have been in some classes with them. However, when we look at our group, not only do I know all of them on a level much higher than what is required to complete the project, I think we are forming friendships through this whole project. It is actually funny because I have been in a group with Shaun before, but the focus was simply on getting the work done, and it never required this type of interaction. Yet when we came into this project, I really didn’t know that much about Shaun or about Sabrina.
I started to think about whose fault it is that I didn’t know the people in my group of 6 for the other class. The first thing I thought was that it must be my fault. Partly, it may be, because I could have taken more of an interest in the people I was working with. However, mainly it was the system. The system that the college uses, in general, does not allow for these relationships to exist. Ultimately, as we learned before, we are working towards grades, not collaboration, networking, passion, etc. On this project, our class and our group was working towards all of those things.
What will it take for this to change? In my opinion, experience is everything. I don’t think that other students, and the administration, will truly understands how it feels to be on a team like this until they actually do it themselves. However, I don’t know if this is very feasible, because so few members of the administration buy into this, and ultimately they are the ones making the decisions. Hopefully some day, they realize the value that could be gained here, and eventually change…I guess we will have to wait and see.
I think this is something I can take away from this project for at least the last semester of my career here. Even though I might be going against the system, I now realize the importance and the value of relationships in groups, and I am going to strive to create these relationships in whatever group projects I have left. I think this is something I can take into the business world as well. As we learned before, sustainability is based on relationships. I think that if I could do something differently in other groups, it would be to focus on getting to know the other people before focusing only on the task at hand. Ultimately, this extra time spent on this is not time that is wasted, but time that creates value.