As an individual, I prefer to work alone so that I have no one to blame for failures and mostly because I am in control of everything that has to do with the situation at hand: time, venue, thoughts, etc. One thing I have always dreaded is group assignments. I believe, in some ways, it’s different from teamwork at the workplace. I am a salesperson by profession, and in my line of work, you have an individual target even though they try to pitch teamwork. The failure or success in meeting the target is all yours. The only time you have a group target is if you lead a team and even though the target is yours, you still have to publish what members of your team are doing. Teamwork also comes into play when you need the supporting units to do their part in fulfilling the customers’ requests. They are obliged to do that because it’s practically their KPI. However, they will sometimes work within their timelines.
Group work when it comes to school work is a different ballgame. You are randomly assigned to groups of people you have little or no knowledge of. You do not know their temperaments, their beliefs, their lifestyle, and so on. There are bound to be clashes between knowledge and ego. As teenagers and undergraduates at the university, you sometimes find situations of physical clashes among group members, and there have been cases where a team member was removed from the presentation because they didn’t contribute. For the postgraduate situation, you approach it differently. You pray and hope that your group members are responsible and mature enough to act on group assignments and projects.
For the EMBA 28 orientation at the Lagos Business School, a lot of emphasis was placed on dropping your ego to succeed, especially with group dynamics and peer learning. This is very significant because sometimes when an individual has mastered a particular topic, they feel very confident and may miss out on valuable detail. Peer learning helps shed light on the blind side. Another aspect that was hammered home was the fact that whether an individual contributes or not, they are entitled to the same scores as the rest of the team, and you are not allowed to omit anyone when submitting assignments. So basically, you fail together and you succeed together.
I am still trying to figure out the lessons to be learned from this for better or worse treatment of groups in the EMBA programme because, for the most part, at work, if a team member isn’t pulling their weight, there are different ways to counter that. I am hopeful that, over time, I will realize what the lessons are.
So far, with my group, it’s been a learning experience with each group meeting and discussion. Everyone tries to share their knowledge and opinions without making a fuss or being disrespectful. I am not sure if it is because we are freshmen or if the dynamics will remain the same over the next two years, but time will tell.
We Learn Every Day