| | November - 20198IN MY OPINIONLet's Go Far...By Anali Makoui, Ph., Director of Learning and Development, Office of Human Resources, Chapman University"Ok, everyone! Get in groups of three - we are going to work on a group project." Do you remember how you felt when you heard these words come out of your professor's mouth? For most people, it's a strong feeling of dread. The experience leaves some with such negative feelings that, even after becoming professors themselves, they refuse to include collaborative work in their curriculum (I have met some). Even those who choose a non-academic career path experience the same dread of collaborative work.In both cases the reasons for the dread are very much the same. You see, whether we are working in a group to put together a video presentation for a class project, or we are part of an interdisciplinary department working together on developing workflow automation, we still worry about ending up doing all the work; about being too domineering or too submissive; about dealing with the domineering person; about someone else getting the credit for our work; about disagreeing with the direction the team seems to be going but too worried about self-image, future repercussions, or fill-in-the-blank, to speak up... The list goes on. In both the academic and non-academic cases, we can trace back the dread to the way humans think and react. After all, human emotions are pretty universal for the most part, at least within the same cultural framework. When I dig even a bit deeper, though, I see yet another interesting pattern: the emotions that arise when we need to work collaboratively are similar to thosethat arise when we are in a situation where we feel that we have little control over the outcome and are afraid of the consequence. The question, then, becomes how can we maximize the feeling of control within a collaboration for everyone involved?
< Page 7 | Page 9 >