The art of disagreeing without dividing
The lessons I learned about disagreement, collaboration and different perspectives through teamwork.
Teamwork seems simple enough: put a group of people together, add their talents and make them work towards a common goal. However, group-based learning has taught me that collaboration isn’t as straightforward as it sounds, merely splitting the tasks and then combining the results.
The lecture on Teams and Teamwork gave me valuable insights on this. The model of Tuckman’s stages of team development, especially the storming stage, indicated to me that it is normal to have conflicting views and opinions to build an effective team. I used to equate successful teamwork with harmony and getting agreement relatively quickly. I was challenged in the lecture to think on whether sometimes by not disagreeing decisions can be weakened in terms of quality.
In particular, the groupthink discussion was thought-provoking, and I learnt that teams can fall into this pattern of agreeing not to disagree as certain team players are afraid to disagree with or voice concern about an idea. This helped me realise that the unstated should not be simply considered as agreed in group discussion.
Another key point was how the roles differ between task-facilitating and relationship-building roles. Whilst it is important to get the job done, it is also important to get people involved, to handle tensions and to ensure that various perspectives are addressed. Even if a team is made up of capable people, these sorts of tasks can cause problems if they are not addressed.
This made me reflect on my perspectives on collaborative working. I would now prefer to involve in group’s decision-making process and not just be focused on delivering my share of work.
For future group projects, I plan to promote positive dialogue and ensure that everyone understands their objectives and consider other ideas before coming to an agreement while encouraging constructive feedback. I also aim to get comfortable at disagreeing in a way that is conducive to the team finding the best approach. Importantly, I discovered that effective teamwork is about accepting differences of the team members and enabling those differences to shape the strategies favourably towards achieving the end goals.
Effective teamwork is about accepting differences of the team members and enabling those differences to shape the strategies favourably towards achieving the end goals.