I found this such an interesting and insightful task for many reasons.

Firstly, I was quite nervous about the workload and being involved in this task and I was wondering how it was all going to work. However, it has been such a great task to be involved in as it really helped me with my learnings and to actually be ‘in a group’ and thinking about the dynamics and leadership styles particularly as I am currently on maternity leave was extremely worthwhile.

From the beginning, I was very conscious about trying to be collaborative as this is important to me and I think it is a great way of involving everyone and ensuring everyone is on the same page. I started the group off in this way and posed a few questions about how everyone would like to go about roles and the actual organisation of the discussion group. Two group members replied to this, one with a similar idea to myself and the other who wanted to launch straight into it and set everything up before hearing back from the other members.

I found this really interesting. In some ways it was absolutely fantastic as I found it great that there was someone in the group who was very assertive and confident in her own thoughts and felt her way was the best way to go about it and literally just set it up. This approach made it very easy for the entire group as we just followed along and added our thoughts where appropriate. However, on the other hand, this approach doesn’t allow for members to get to know each other through a friendly and cooperative way. It could also be sending a message that others’ ideas aren’t important and we just need to get this done.

It was such an insightful activity as I hadn’t thought about it like this before. So many positives and negatives for both approaches. If the collaboration could have happened and then a quick decision/vote on the approach decided to take, this may have been a positive way to do this. Time was definitely an issue though and there was the concern that not all group members would reply so I can also see why one group member made a quick decision for everyone that would enable the task to begin. It also highlights the importance of everyone being involved ‘quickly’ from the beginning otherwise it makes it very difficult to finish the task in plenty of time.