Group Goals & Social Interdependence

The assigned reading on goals and the concept of social interdependence hit home with my work in the group of the YMCA Club. Like you might know from my past entry is that due to unfortunate events I was unable to attend our first official leadership meeting. Fortunately I had no surprises for my life and I was able to have a fairly constructive meeting regarding group goals. We were all able to tap in our ideas for what we thought would be effective group goals for the semester. We did not have as much discussion but once the meeting concluded I was able to type them all and look at them with my advisor. We plan to take these goals and really work on solidifying them within the whole group. This will involve constant reminders and conversations regarding the overall vision of the group’s success. I was also able to sit down with every member of my team this week to talk about their individual goals. I heard great things from the whole team regarding what they expect to get from this experience, and it had a strong correlation with the group goals. As the leader of this group, I hope to help every member of this team reach their goal. If for some reason I am not able to, I will see it as a way that I was unable to reach my individual goal. My individual goal is to be a coach and resource for this whole team so they can reach their potential. As for the trust factor, I know that there is a sense of respect but I am still waiting to see that strong bond grow within the group. I am not trying to say I do not see a bond forming, I just know that there can be factions within the group. It still appears though that the group is looking forward to working in a cooperative fashion this semester. People plan to use and take advantage of each others resources in order to reach our goal of offering an effective student organization that offers professional development, volunteer work, leadership opportunity and FUN!

The Partners Group still has yet to really establish any group or individual goals within this program or team. The reality though is that we all do have a shared vision, and that is to run a successful program that helps the youth. In order to run a successful program, we all understand that we need to set up the college and youth partners up for success. We all do have separate styles in successfully achieving this outcome, but we all share a vision. This past week we have strived for this vision by successfully training the college partners and creating structure for the program. There is no real competition with anyone in our group, and we have worked cooperatively to get the job done. You can sense that the group has naturally been gaining more trust and comfort around each other as time has past. I really look forward to the first week of programming to see how our group is able to work with the demands that these youth and college students bring.

The First Week of Groups

The first full week of school is coming up to its finale and it was great to finally get the ball rolling with the two groups that I am a part of. The two groups that I am a part of are formatted much differently from each other and my role differs in both. In one group my role is to direct and lead six people through decision making processes, strategic planning and be the liasion for the community. For the purpose of this blog series they will labeled as team Mighty Ducks.

The Mighty Ducks were able to have a great full day retreat this past Sunday at our local East Campus facility. It was the first time we all met together as a group, and we were welcoming three new members. Fortunately these three new members already knew the majority of the group already, so the transition was not too difficult. The one thing I wanted to make sure I did was to have one-on-one meetings with the new members before the retreat, so they could gain an understanding of what the Mighty Ducks were all about. I tried to play the observer/participant role so I could be engaged in our discussion but still see habits of each group member. This helped significantly because I was able to acknowledge that some members of the group are shy to give their opinion while others are not. As the leader of the group though I need to make sure that I work to hear everyone's thoughts. I felt like the activities and role plays that we conducted were successful, and with the help of my advisors we were able to connect them with our group dynamics. The real tester was when we finished our team building activities and started to talk about the good stuff. This good stuff included an hot issue that our organization has been puzzling to solve for the past year. We certainly went over our time limit for the discussion but it was great to see how the group interacted. Once I felt that we got to the point where we were saying things that already had been heard, I decided to step in to take the leadership role in making a decision/plan. The group had a consensus agreement with the decision and we conducted it this past week at our meeting. One big help for our group was the fun games we played during our breaks, and these helped our brains refresh. The group definitely had a great time and it was a good fresh way to start the semester out.

The rest of the week due to family reasons I was not able to spend as much attention with the group as I would have liked. I unfortunately missed our weekly Mighty Ducks meeting but it was great to watch our new Vice President step in to run the meeting. The day I came back I was enthrailed to see that all of the Mighty Ducks group was there to represent our organization at a Campus Fair. I am really excited to see where the rest of the semester takes us, and how we continue to use what we learned from our retreat.

In the other group I am a part of I have a much different role. The group dynamics include six undergraduate student and a graduate student who is meant to serve as our advisor. The groups responsibilities involve creating programming for an after school youth program that runs from Monday to Wednesday. For each day, two of us will be at our site supervising the activities of the day. We are given the title of being known as the Site Coordinators. Even though the GA is meant to serve as the leader for this group, it is evident that she still is comforting herself into the role. This is mainly because she has never been in this program before, and is still really trying to figure out her role. Overall though already it seems that she is a very easy to person to get along with who will be a great resource for the group. We had our first real official meeting on Monday in order to get ready for the semester. We started it off with some fun games and then got into the whole programming part. Unfortunately it took us a good fifteen minutes to really start a productive conversation where we put our ideas onto paper. I would say the main reason for this was because we still are trying to figure out who is supposed to actually be the leader of the group. It ended up being one of the six undergraduate students who was a Site Coordinator last year who took the initiative to organize all our great ideas. After we were done creating these great ideas, it ended up being me who played the role of making sure that we got all the group involved. I love to make sure that responsibilities are always being shared, so I asked one person to relinquish one of their duties to give to another person. Our two hour meeting was a great first step for getting the program started. We will meet up again this week to fully plan the remainder of our semester and plan the orientation for our staff/volunteers. It will be interesting to observe how the group reacts and works with each other for the remainder of the semester. The best name I can think of for this group will most likely be Team America

The remainder of the semester should be a great one with Team America and The Mighty Ducks. I really like how for each group, I am given a different role and this should help my development with group work. I will be able to see two different worlds of working with groups and really develop my group skills the best way possible.