What practical ways can classmates employ/ apply in your current status as university students or your future professions/ careers?

 

In real life, there are many situations we cannot face alone. For example, we cannot play a football match with only one player. Good team building can make a meaningless thing meaningful. 

During our university life, we need to complete many group projects. We need to form teams with different people with complementary skills to facilitate the working process. In an ideal case, most group members have different skills, all of them can do the parts they are good at individually or with different very small groups without any argument. It happens most when we can choose our teammates. However, the groupmate will be assigned by the professor under some circumstances. At this moment, the four approaches about team building, goal setting, role clarification, problem-solving and interpersonal relationships (Salas & Driskell,1999), is showing their true power. First, we need to set a clear goal, especially regarding the time limit. For example, finish some parts in a limited time. Unlike just following the deadline given, everyone can know how many jobs they need to do in this short period to finish the assignment with this goal setting. The purpose of this action is to let all members know their common goal, knowing the bonding between each other. This is a good ice-breaking action to prevent the uncooperating due to strangeness. Then is the role clarification. The completing of a group project assignment usually requires integrated skills, such as video editing, good pronouncing, fluent speaking etc.… Owing to the different elective subjects in secondary school, or the extra-curricular activities, some of the members may perform better in different aspects. At this moment, the division of labour according to members’ abilities is very important. It can lower the workload of the project and save a lot of time. After that is problem-solving. When a problem is formed, different members may have different points of view about how to solve it. Now, listening to and respecting each other’s ideas is the best way to create a more comprehensive idea since the solution produced by different people may have some blind spots due to the environment, they grew up in. A solution formed by different members can cover each other’s blind spots. Finally, is the interpersonal relationship. What we need to do currently is very similar to that in problem-solving, maintaining open communication. So that the members can build trust between each other. This is the main method to turn ‘strangers’ into members. Without open communication, just keep arguing against each other can never make the relationship more intimate.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reference 

Salas & Driskell (1999). The Effect of Team Building on Performance: An Integration

 

 | Steps | Examples 
 | Step1) Discover a trustworthy and supportive brotherhood | Mature friends (Protective Factors)
 | Step2) Tell your friends your problem | Stress due to assignment (Stressors)
 | Step3) explain to them, why do you feel stressful | Deadline coming and don’t know how to start to do (Disruption)
 | Step4) evaluate the level of stress | Cry
 | Step5) Seek for advice and support  | “What can I do?” (Reintegration)
 | Step6) Memorize the solution | Typing main point of their advice  
 | Step7) Do it out  | Even though not confident, try the solution (Resilient Reintegration)
 | Step8) Evaluation  | Super stress -> mid-level 

Strength:

 Monroe's motivated sequence aids speakers in efficiently communicating their point to the audience. It urges speakers to inspire their listeners to respond positively to their message.

 For those tips that Steve Jobs used, he achieved the standard of effective communication, which is effective and efficient conveying information.

 

In his early life, he tried to fight for democracy and fairness in South Africa without violence . Which made him the target of the authorities. He was imprisoned in 1964.

In 1990, South Africa government under president De Klerk released Mandela. He became the first elected president of South Africa in 1994.

 

Tuckman’s model is about the process of team development. This is Bruce Tuckman’s theory. This model helps us understanding the flow that how a team develop from the beginning to the end.

There are 5 stages of development, forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5
Forming | Storming | Norming | Performing | Adjourning
Group with people new meet | Quarrel exists in the team | Settle the conflicts | Members support the team to makes productive results | Self-reflection. Recognise members effort.

The strength of the model is enhancing productivity of teamwork. The weakness is that the team cannot succeed any work if they skip any steps, especially the norming process to satisfy members’ feelings. 

Being a famous activist in the world, Mandela's spirits are great for us to learn from. Resilience is one of the qualities that I admire most. He has been fighting the apartheid government and he knew that was a difficult goal to achieve. However, even after being imprisoned for 27 years for political reasons, he still prevails over the hardships. The spirit behind this may be the dream, even the mission, of a unified South Africa. Mandela was influenced by his parents since childhood, which made him develop a stubborn sense of fairness. This shows that having a firm belief may be a key to success and helps us to become more resilient. For me, I would cultivate my resilience by sticking to my original goals, which take the realization of my dream as a belief. For example, I have chosen to be a building engineer in the future.I would be more resilient when overcoming difficulties since I am pursuing my dream in my career pathway. And my belief behind this is to contribute to the industry by inheriting traditional techniques and new ideas with my knowledge. Resilience is also helpful to our daily life, because we may encounter some difficulties, such as things related to our family and friends and relationships.

So, all in all, I believe that Mandela's attribute of resilience is applicable for me and worth learning from.  

•      A resiliency model was developed by Glenn Richardson in 2002. The model shows the process of resilience.

•      Starting from biopsychospiritual homeostasis, a comfort zone. People have adapted to their situation physically, mentally, and spiritually, whether good or bad.

•      Disruption occurs which taking people out of homeostasis. It may be a trauma, adversity, or a perceived stressor.

•      Then, people reintegrate to restore to biopsychospiritual homeostasis. The protective factors are helped. The more protective factors people have, the more likely they are to become more resilient. It is classified on the levels of individual, family, and community. (Fleming and Ledogar, 2008; Olsson et al., 2003)

For example,

1.     Individuals: Constitutional resilience, Sociability, Intelligence, Communication skills, Personal attributes.

2.     Family: Supportive families, Socioeconomic status.

3.     Community: School experiences, Supportive communities.

•      There are four possible outcomes after reintegration: Resilient reintegration, Reintegration back to homeostasis, Reintegration with loss and Dysfunctional Reintegration.

•      Through resilience reintegration

•      Resilient Qualities

 

Richardson’s Resilience Model

Richardson proposed "Resilience and the Meta-Theory of Resilience"

3 distinct waves of resilience surveys:

1) the characteristics of people who can effectively cope with and grow in disturbances are identified

2) the process by which people acquire these characteristics is studied

3) a recognition of innate resilience and our ability to grow and develop

the concept of bio-spiritual balance

è enables us (body, mind, and spirit) to adapt to the current living environment

è bombarded with stressors, adverse events, and other expected and unexpected life events or "life cues."

è Our ability to adapt & respond to such life events is affected by resilient qualities and reintegration of previous resilience

è everyday stressors & protective factors -> affect individuals (long term)

è vital cues & protective factors -> disruption occurs

è The elastic quality -> efficient processing of life cues and maintenance of homeostasis

è A life interruption changes the personal integrity of the world paradigm

è Perceived negative / positive outcomes & various emotional & evaluative responses (interruption)

The reintegration process leads to 4 outcomes:

(1) resilient reintegration (adaptation leads to higher levels of homeostasis)

(2) reintegration back to homeostasis (overcome disruption)

(3) reintegration with loss (establishes lower levels of homeostasis Levels of homeostasis)

(4) dysfunctional reintegration (maladaptive strategies are used in response to stressors)

Strengths:

Through constant coping and recovery, resilient learners can have strengths:

1) experience growth

2) knowledge

3) self-understanding

4) enhanced resilience qualities

Weaknesses:

When too much resilience:

1) Resilient people could persist too long with unattainable goals

- wastes a lot of time & energy sticking to unrealistic goals

- even be unrealistic and likely unattainable

2) Too much resilience could make people overly tolerant of adversity

People accept difficult situations > necessary

-> using their resilience as an excuse

3) Too much resilience can limit leadership effectiveness

unnaturally positively to difficult and stressful situations -> builds a rigid shield of denial -> difficult to lead / be led

“Great things in business are never done by one person, they are done by a team of people”. This is one of the Jobs' famous words, and we can understand how vital collaboration is in business from this line. In truth, collaboration is essential in both personal and professional life. Good communication is one of the characteristics that encourage collaboration. 

We typically have a lot of group activities, such as group reports or group discussions, in our present university status. Every connection is founded on communication, whether it's two strangers chatting to each other or students explaining their work to their classmates. Lack of effective communication may make it harder to form positive relationships among coworkers, thus excellent communication can help to keep such relationships going. He wanders freely during the presentation, just like Jobs, creating a casual setting that can assist establish a better communication climate and boost audience communication. Maintaining a comfortable attitude with the group may also contribute to improved collaboration in our group activities. It's crucial to maintain a humorous environment, but what's stated or presented is as important. He, like Jobs, seldom-used words on his presentations, preferring to let the visual speak for itself and support it with anecdotes. More graphics and fewer text make the report more compact and encourage people to keep reading. By adding a story to the picture, you may give it more significance and make the presentation more intriguing and engaging. It can be shown that excellent communication is critical for a team, whether in the classroom or at business.

Practice active listening and public speaking: Good listeners are always effective communicators. Active listening requires responding constructively to what others say and asking follow-up questions to show that you are paying attention.

 Despite the fact that public speaking might be scary, there is no better way to improve your communication skills than to engage in public speaking activities. Great communicators can accurately portray their emotions whether speaking to a large audience or one-on-one. Regularly speaking in front of a group will show your strengths and weaknesses while also challenging you to improve your communication abilities.