team stuff

I keep going back and forth as to how much I am getting from the team experience in this class. Well, that’s not entirely right. So far, I’m not getting much from it at all. What I go back and forth on is whether I’d do it differently.

This is a stretch-the-status-quo class. That’s why we’re here. I also think it’s a really appropriate “capstone” type of course, in that you have to be comfortable working with others, expressing and defending your views, listening, and doing lots of different types of assignments.

The main frustration is related to the theory of team composition. Because we’re divided into teams that feature both full- and part-time students, scheduling is very difficult. It’s hard enough when everyone is in the FT program, but here, our only campus overlap time is during and immediately after this class.

Now I know the real world works that way, so perhaps it’s just practice in dealing with what I will encounter for the rest of my life. It actually is that, so I am not going to turn this into a bitch session, because even though I’d like if it were done differently, I appreciate that Jennifer set it up the way she did. If it were a BAD idea, Simona would have voted strongly against it.

Maybe it’s that I’m more frustrated with my actual team. There are some cool perspectives emerging, but unlike in all other classes of which I’ve been a part, I can’t quite seem to identify whether there is another team member that shares my interest in getting stuff done without all the stalling and non-decision making. We have our Team Teaching project on Monday, and we didn’t really begin working on it in earnest until this week, because it wasn’t clear until then who actually was working on it. No one would commit to wanting to work on this project vs. another project, or even saying whether they felt whether it was important or a good idea to divide and conquer. I tried to play facilitator during our after-class meetings, and/but no one wanted to take the baton, and no one was decisive about much of anything. VERY different from the other team experiences I’ve had at Haas. Again, prep for life.

So I tried a new approach. I had what I thought was a differentiated and fun approach to the Happiness project, so I asked for one other person to help, then did the project along with a bit of help from him. Then I emailed one of the other group members to ask her if I could “take a look at the draft of the presentation” for the Team Teaching to see how it was going, since she had loosely committed upon my asking last week to take a first stab. She sent out a shell deck, I gave her some thoughts, and suggested that she work primarily with the 3 other members who had not done anything on the Happiness piece. So she did that and copied me on it and I think it is going well, or at least better, now. I just sent out an email indicating that I think we should be dividing work that’s due in March, and that each person should choose 2 to get involved in (maybe opting for less work if you do Team Teaching because that’s non-trivial)…let’s see if that works better! Hopefully we can actually get some quality face time as a bunch of colleagues instead of a group of people that doesn’t know each other very well.