Group Process Screwup...

It was great to form our Project Team on Sunday night, and then take Craig Yale’s seminar on Group Dynamics on Monday morning.  Very helpful as we’re preparing for forming, storming, norming and performing.  Except we (I) fell on our faces last night.

We’ve broken our project down into functional areas, and have teams supporting/developing these aspects of the project.  Not sure how we got there, but out of our three functional teams, we’ve managed to develop “boys” and “girls” teams.  That’s kind of interesting to me after-the-fact – its not something we considered when we were forming the workgroups, but that’s a different topic.

So for the gap… we met at 7 pm to check in and plough through the next round of tasks.  The “girls” (clinical realignment group) moved to a different room – great productivity tool.  Our advisor, Ed Eroe, came in around 9 to check up on us, answer questions, etc.  It started off pretty casual… “where are you guys… what’s the process…” and moved on to “everyone comfortable… what’s the presentation format”, all good stuff.  Except we went through the whole exercise without the boys realizing what we were doing OR that the girls were out of the room.

Which was a mistake.

We’ve had little “storming” in our group, but this incident had the potential for throwing gasoline on a smoldering fire.  Turned out not to be a big deal – Ed ran through the same material with the girls before we figured out what we’d done, but it definitely wouldn’t contribute to healthy group dynamics.

Its interesting how in real-life the small things on a project are often the things that can cause the big problems.  Glad this didn’t turn into a bigger problem, but its definitely a sensitivity lesson learned to to be learned by our group.