Exercises
Review the following comments, which teammates made about one another midway through their project. How would you handle the situation if you were Carlos and Veronica? What can Mike do to regain the trust and respect of his teammates?
Carlos: It seems to me that Mike isn’t very involved. Mike joins in the discussion we have during class time about the project, but he seems to put very little work in outside of class. After we were working on the project proposal in lab, he told me he felt his voice was not being heard, but then he did not post any changes to the project proposal at the time we all agreed to post our changes.
Mike: The first time we met to work on a document, I felt ignored by the rest of the group. I spoke my concerns to some of the others, however, and have confidence that it won’t happen again. . . . I feel like I’ve not been doing anything. . . . For the most part, the aspect of the project that I’ve been assigned to work on is on hold until I get more information from the rest of the group.
Veronica: The team is working all right together — mostly everything is getting done. The only noteworthy incident would involve Mike, who seems to never know what is going on. He was in charge of compiling the proposal, and we had to extend the date many times. . . . He even said he couldn’t write it because he was missing some info that Carlos had e-mailed out two weeks ago.
After reading the e-mails in Figure 8.12, answer the following questions:
What do you think about the tone of each of these e-mails? How do you think the recipients responded to them? What do you suspect was the outcome of this exchange?
The sample e-mails throughout this book try to phrase problems in nonaccusatory language. Reread these sample e-mails and find some wording that Joe and Jayme might have used to make their exchange less accusatory.
Overall, what strategies could these students have used to avoid this problem in the first place? Now that the problem has occurred, what strategies could they use to get their team back on the right track?