Individual Reflection Experience Working a Group

Individual Reflection experience working a group It was quite an experience to work with a group on a project instead of working alone. There is actually a delicate dichotomy between the characteristics required to fulfill these two pivotal components of both education and the modern workplace environment. On the one hand, autonomy, independence, and self-motivation are vital prerequisites for working alone, and are desirable qualities as such.

On the other hand, these qualities are useless if an individual is not adroit at communicating, resolving conflict by considering different perspectives (Melamed and Reiman, 2006), and working well with others. There are two distinct sets of skills required for working in these various settings, although there are some aspects of working in a group which do require the aforementioned traits associated with working independently. My experience working in a group was actually fairly pleasant, and certainly productive.

Essentially, what is required when working in a group is collectively delineating all of the tasks and responsibilities that one would simply take on oneself in a situation in which he or she was working autonomously. As such, one of the most pivotal aspects of working with a group was collectively deciding what specific steps needed to be taken in order to accomplish our objective. In this initial step, the various intricacies associated with working with others were unveiled.

The first of these was communicating ideas to others in a respectful way -- in an efficient and effective manner (Harper, 2011) -- in which no one would take anything personally and get offended. A crucial aspect of doing this involves listening. There are many people who are trained and bred to be leaders, and who automatically want to simply disseminate orders. However, in a group setting in which everyone has such a proclivity, someone has got to listen.

Therefore, in this initial step I had the opportunity to practice active listening and "respond appropriately" (Cortright, 2012). Doing so enabled me to understand not only what the others were saying, but also what they were not saying -- which yielded insight into the project as well. However, active listening does not work in a group setting if only one person is engaged in this practice. Therefore, it was necessary a couple of times to tell certain loquacious members of the group to allow others to share their input.

A significant benefit about working with others in groups is that everyone has different abilities and skills. As such, some people are better at other things than others are. Working in a group presents the opportunity for individuals to utilize their strengths while minimizing their weaknesses, which might require a degree of emotional intelligence to discern (Skiffington and Zeus, 2010). For instance, I have typically been a better researcher than a writer. Individually, I would need to work on this latter skill substantially in order to successfully complete a project.

But in a group setting, I was able to focus on my strength -- researching -- and allow others to do the writing. This way I was actually able to improve my own writing skills, by having access to a viable example of a piece of writing (or some similar piece) that I may need to produce on my own one day. However, as with everything related to group efforts, facilitating the actual gestalt that working a group can provides is the real challenge.

There were certain situations in this project when more than one person wanted to do different aspects of the project. Although such enthusiasm is encouraging, it is not pragmatic to have more than one person working on.