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It goes without saying that the group can start working as soon as the assignment is given. (As my assignments are described in the course outline, there is no excuse for last minute drama.) Functional groups start thinking and collecting information immediately and give themselves time to do good work before the time crunch with midterms and assignments in other courses. Even those who prefer to work at the last minute can do great work in a functional team simply by scheduling the “last minute” to have a definition other than the “due date”.

Continue reading “Functional groups put in the time”

and end up being less than the sum of the parts

In a dysfunctional group, the group mark is often lower than the average individual marks. The members actually make each other worse. Dysfunctional groups take their direction from the person who shouts the loudest rather than the person with the clearest understanding of the mandate, best judgement, or most persuasive logic. This results from two complementary weaknesses in the group. One is that the people who are shouting the loudest have missed the point. This could be that they have been indoctrinated in lower levels of the school system to treat assignments as a formula rather than a minimum requirement, or they want to do the assignment with the least amount of work. If they get enough teammates on board with their proposed approach, they can often shout down the wiser suggestions.

(the loud-shouters, not the smart-thinkers)

A good clue that you are on the express train to Dysfunction Junction is if the emerging group leadership are asking questions based on the concept “do we have to”? As a general rule, in both individual and group assignments, even if you do not “have to”, if you can think of that thing as a possibly relevant thing to do, you almost always should do it, because that could be the thing that makes the difference between a C and a B (if in fact you do have to do it) or between a B and an A (if you don’t have to do it, and you do it, then it gives a good impression of your initiative). It may be true that the majority of the group are not interested in the element being proposed by some of the members. Why not agree that members explore the various angles and elements and bring them back to pool the knowledge? Try to find ways to incorporate multiple perspectives within some kind of a unifying framework. Discouraging group members from adding new layers to the project is a red flag of dysfunction.

(you also fail when you give up on the team)

The complementary factor that leads to dysfunction is that the people with the wiser suggestions give up trying to persuade the others or cannot put their ideas across persuasively. The A+++ student doing a group project on a topic that is years beneath them is not going to learn anything new within the content material in the topic, but that does not mean there is nothing to be learned.

Continue reading “Being smart is not enough”