Describe and analyze your learning from these experiences, identifying the implications for you as manager.

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Describe and analyze your learning from these experiences, identifying the implications for you as manager.

In order to complete my assignment I am going to take 2 experiences from my group work, which was undertook in skills. The aim of the group work was to produce a ‘learning resource’, which will tackle some sort of problem/deficiency within the college. I will take the third experience from my own experiences in life.

Communication

Whilst undertaking my group assignment I would consider the most important factor for successful group work, perhaps overlooked, to be communication.

“In any organization, the communication of information is necessary to achieve co-ordination”.

 I believe this quote by Charles Perrow to be very clear and extremely fitting to the situation. It highlights the fact that in any group, whatever the size, good communication is essential for success. As soon as the word communication is mentioned we immediately think of ‘talking ‘ to someone else. Getting our message across. Perhaps this in itself maybe the biggest problem. There are many mediums of communication eg. Telephone, face to face, e-mail, fax, letter etc.

So how do we actually get a task done? What medium of communication is used to make this happen?

Whilst undertaking the group assignment to biggest problem we had was communication. Obviously we interacted face-to-face whilst working in the project but I felt we did this very poorly. As there was actually no designated leader in the group I felt that the progress of the group would suffer, I was right. As there was no one to give orders to the group the members felt that no one really wanted be too outspoken, or to take charge of the group. I felt that we were holding back. On the occasions we had group meetings we would struggle to convey information to each other. . We agreed one what needed to be done but we didn’t get it done. Looking back I believe the problem to be poor quality communication. For example, when we were talking in groups we would each decide the tasks, which needed to be done, then we would assign them to a certain member of the group.

The method of communication was verbal, face-to-face; we previously discussed each task so I believe that we understood what we were supposed to be doing. However, I believe that the biggest problem was the lack of ‘non verbal’ communication.

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Although the communication between the members was made it was not as effective as it should have been. The body language and facial gestures whilst communicating weren’t correct. The manner in which communication was made was too laid back; there was a definite lack of ‘seriousness’ in the kinesics of the message conveyor. There wasn’t really any recognition of confirmation from the receiver, so there is no way of actually knowing whether the receiver understood the message. This was perhaps our biggest problem.

However, I found that when we communicated via phone & e-mail communication was enhanced/improved. I myself found ...

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