Establish how you will work together
Decide group roles
Selecting group roles early on will foster a positive and effective team environment. Roles can be assigned permanently, or may be rotated periodically to give each member opportunities for personal and professional growth. Since different people have different strengths and weaknesses, some may feel more comfortable with a particular role.
Let’s have a look at what 4 of the roles often found in teamwork.
Role and responsibilities
- provides direction and motivation to the team; establishes ground rules; and gives encouragement such as praise and constructive feedback
- in charge of clarifying the team goals and helping everyone to set sub-goals, and thus subtasks.
- usually starts the team meetings, introduces each topic, and keeps the group on track and oriented towards its goals.
- also ensures that the team as a whole and each of its members complete their subtasks by the set deadlines.
Does this suit you?
Ideal for someone who enjoys taking responsibility for the success of their team as a whole, and for identifying and utilising members’ diverse skills, backgrounds and strengths.
Role and responsibilities
- keeps track of how the group is functioning; and initiates regular discussions to make sure the team environment remains positive and productive.
- monitors team dynamics, and if they identify tension or conflict between members, they act as a mediator to listen to disagreements and help reach an inclusive resolution.
- ensures each team member has opportunities to participate and learn. This may sometimes involve asking less active members to add their comments to team discussions.
Does this suit you?
Ideal for someone who is okay with peers expressing contrasting opinions, and then striving to help them reach resolution. This role is for someone who is able to observe how team-mates are feeling throughout the process of working as a group and provide them with the support they need.
Role and responsibilities
- records all group discussions, decisions and negotiations including attendance at meetings.
- ensures that everyone is ‘on the same page’. To achieve this, they document discussions and decisions for the rest of the group and distribute a summary of each meeting to all team members.
- helps the team progress through all the agenda items; avoids spending excessive time on one topic.
Does this suit you?
Great for someone who is well-organised and a good communicator.
Role and responsibilities
- works to check timelines, identifies areas of need or overlaps in contributions, and ensures consistency across subtasks with a focus on the final version.
- ensures the team avoids falling into what’s called ‘groupthink’. Groupthink occurs when a team reaches a consensus without critical reasoning or evaluation of the alternative approaches to solve an issue or the potential consequences. In other words, when faced by the pressure to reach the group goal and avoid conflict, the individual members end up agreeing with the majority’s perspective, and not expressing their own opinions.
- is open and flexible to problems, possibilities, and opposing ideas, and double-checks every detail to make sure nothing has been overlooked.
Does this suit you?
If one of your strengths is to pay a lot of attention to detail, you would be a great quality controller. This doesn’t mean that you have to be a perfectionist, but that you like doing things to a high standard, and are not happy until different suitable options to address an issue have been explored.
Allocate subtasks fairly
Allocating subtasks goes together with deciding which role each member wants to take on in a group project. Keep in mind that you need to carefully consider how long each subtask will take, each member’s availability and strengths, and how each one fits along the timeline for the project’s completion.
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Schedule regular meetings, set ground rules and document decisions
Having regular meetings is essential for the success of a team. Meetings don’t have to be long or even in person, but they are important to provide each member with a chance to update the whole team on their progress, and/or raise any concerns they have.
The frequency of meetings should be set based on how long you have to complete your project (i.e. weeks or a whole semester). Ideally, you should organise the first meeting as soon as the assessment task is given. Even if you don’t plan to start working on the assessment immediately, at least meet as a team early on so you can all be sure you understand the task - what’s required, when it is due and how long it might take - and decide when your group work should begin.
Put a schedule of formal meetings in place. Do NOT just group text or email! Group texts or emails can be problematic as not everyone will always be online simultaneously, and long text/email chains are often too difficult to follow. You could meet (in person or online) immediately before or after the class relevant to your task. This way, you will have the class content fresh in your mind.
It’s also essential to set ground rules for meetings. As a team, you need to explicitly agree on the ground rules and what each one means. The establishment of rules lessens the chances for discussions (especially online) becoming disorderly which may discourage quieter team members from participating. For example, you may set the rule “Be inclusive” and define it to include such actions as “use members’ preferred pronouns”.