The evolution of our team

Set with the task of finding a team, I hunted through stream for anyone who might happen to live somewhere near me, when I came across a post from someone in my home town! How lucky was that!? I immediately contacted Ana to find out she had formed a team with two other people an hour away from where we live! Our team had quickly been formed before we had even started the course, lucky for us!

Initially we decided which set of questions we wanted to work from in our group assignment and then picked appropriate topics for our own position papers. We kept in contact throughout the first few weeks via a Facebook page we had set up and gave each other help when needed. Then it was time to start on the group assignment. We set up a meeting on Skype where we introduced ourselves and discussed where we wanted to go with the assignment, our goals and aims. We also decided our group roles; Nadine would be the leader, Ana was the editor, Melinda would be in charge of conducting the surveys and I was the editor. We choose our questions and began our week’s works.

In terms of Belbin roles, I don’t believe any of us fit in to specific roles however we did have characteristics of some.  I feel that Melinda fit in best as the Resource Investigator as she was in charge of contacting people for interviews as well as conducting them. She would also find information that she believed the rest of us could use for our research which was highly helpful, especially an article she found on compulsory vaccinations for me. Ana may have been an implementer; she was quite whilst doing work but often got a lot done. She had to put a lot of time into the group report, first with writing her own parts of the research and secondly with editing everyone else’s work as we went along. Ana sought everyone’s ideas before making a final decision and worked hard to produce a final compilation of everyone’s work. Nadine was the plant, as the team leader she was always supplying us with ideas to consider as well as new information. Decisions with the layout for our report came from her ideas as did a lot of our goals and aims for the assignment. I believe my role was the co-ordinator, I feel that I was able to help the group set deadlines for our work and helped delegate out our own roles at the beginning of the set up process.

Our different roles meant our group functioned well and had the main aspects covered. This meant the process of creating and completing the report went very smoothly. We all got along well with each other and were happy to help should someone be struggling with their task. I feel that we all worked well as a team and were highly successful. At the beginning we said had that it would be great to get an A on our report, but that we would just do our best and see how it went. We definitely all did our best, working through the holiday break to have everything in on time and well written. All our hard work was rewarded with an A! Congratulations team!