Self Reflection of Tina

Self-Reflection of High Performance Collaboration

The reflection of learning journey about the course

When I reviewing the High Performance Collaboration course, I feel that all the classmates have made a wonderful journey together with our professor. I remember at the very beginning of the first class we finish a survey about “which topic you interested in the most”. The reason why take that survey seems quitter clear as if the professor can find out what the students interested in, he can provide more materials related to those heated topics.

Four Stages of Negotiation

Among all the topics we discussed in class during this semester, some of them leave an impressive image in my brain. For instance, the negotiation part is very interesting and practical from my perspective since the best outcome occurs when the win-win situation takes place and negotiation skills are main tools to make that happen. If a negotiator can handle inhibitors and facilitators well, then he can dominant the communication and negotiation process to boost the win-win situation take place. However, that is not easy because during the process, we should take a large quantity of issues into consideration, especially when deal with the detailed things in reality, some information are hard to get and some information are already distort by others. Thus I believe that despite we learn some negotiation skills and methods in the class, but if we really want to be a good negotiator in the future, we need more practice during work or daily life.

Conflict Resolution Model

The conflict management part is so attractive to me. Previous experience shows that when working with different people in a team, though all of you aim to achieve a common goal, conflict opinions are always there when pursuing the goal. People hold different ideas all the time, so when there are some conflicts taken place in your team, how will you handle this kind of problems. I found this topic is attractive because it is really quite common and we may face such troubles in every meeting or discuss. The reading material covers detail method to manage the conflicts, such as strategies for managing disagreements, which can help us a lot when we need to handle such situations in the future. Particularly, the “teaming” process, an effective incentive system and organization structure are three critical points of collaboration. We not only need to handle the conflicts but also learn to prevent the conflict from happening and learn from the past experience at the same time.

Two Types of Structure For Virtual Organization

Managing a virtual organization is another impressive topic on my mind. Before we get in-depth knowledge about this area, I focus too much on the advantages of virtual organization. In my opinion, it indeed save a lot of money and space compared with physical organizations. Besides, it seems virtual organization is easier to management because the high technology represents effective and efficiency. However, after take this course I begin to learn using more dialectical attitude towards all issues and this one is not an exception. Virtual organizations do have some disadvantages as well. For example, the obstacles of communication are more obvious than other organizations. Another critical issue may be the trust crisis of virtual teams. We know that nothing is perfect in the world so we should hold a dialectical attitude towards the world and try to both find out the bright side and the dark side in one issue.

However, the most impressive part for me is not the content related to professional knowledge, instead, it’s the creative teaching method using in this course. Firstly, our professor emphasizes to letting students show their own talent rather then giving lecture all by himself during the class. I really enjoy those presentations with my teammates because every time we make full preparation for the presentation and we can learn a lot from other classmates’ statement at the same time. To allowing the students participate into each class is a good method to show how many did they learn and how well can they use the knowledge into reality. I believe the second creative point about this course is the format of our assignments. We build a blog to show our assignments to the public. The advantage of this format compared with traditional assignment format is you can see other classmates’ assignments and learn from their excellent parts. By contrast with writing an assignment alone by oneself, the blog format provides us an information exchanging process. Besides, you can leave a comment or discuss with the author at the message board. That is to say we have a broader way to acquire knowledge based on the high technology platform. Last but not least, we build teams when completing the learn journey with our classmates. More importantly, since we also build class-crossing team so that we make some new friends and they bring us a vast array of new ideas and knowledge. The team building method reflects our key issue of this course, which is learn to collaborate well in an effective team.

In fact, the teaching format of the professor is quite controversial to some extent. Some of us can not make sure this is a effective way to learn because it seems that we consume the majority of time to presentation in the class and the professor speaks for a little time. It gives us a kind of feeling that the topics covered in the class contain less content than other course when the teacher give three-hour long lectures. However, this concern proved to be ridiculous while we complimenting our first assignment. At that time, we asked to design an effective and creative English course for undergraduate students. During that period, I read many papers and academic materials about the topic of “How to teaching creatively and effectively”. After reading and organizing the information, I know more about teaching format, especially the advanced creative teaching format. My teammates and I found out that the course indeed using a creative format and we can experience a more cheerful learning journey at the same time. For instance, some experts believe that an effective and innovation teaching method should concluding analyzing needs adapt changes, leading leaner thinking initially and provide intrinsic motivation to learners. Apparently, after reading these materials I found the reason why our High Performance Collaboration course organized like this.

The reflection of learning journey with teammates 

With Kite and Wind

At the beginning of this course, we built a team with three members and gave our team a special name-Kite and Wind. The implication of this name is the three members in our team are just like the kite, the string and the wind, because without anyone we will fail to fly high. 

Generally speaking, we maintain a smooth collaborating process since we discuss every detail about our project together and fortunately there is no authoritarian in our team. But as I just mentioned, there are always some obstacles when building an effective team. Only when we find out our weakness can we improve our performance next time. In this collaboration experience, first all of us are come from Mainland China so that we have the same culture background. Besides, since we three are participate in the same course during the year, we learn a lot of same theories and our philosophies and values were carved by these courses and become similarity to each other to some extent. That is to say we often tend to use some similar criteria to measure one issue. For example, we may use the same criteria to define what is a good leader and what is effective team-based management. Such considerations take place unconsciously and at that time since we are busy in preparing the project, we failed to notice or avoid that. More importantly, the overly accepting problem is another critical obstacle that I want to mention. One of the reason could be we are really lack of real working experience and lose to distinguish right from wrong in some occasions. A range of different ideas towards one issue looks all works for us. How to select them or how to judge them are seems quite difficult for us. Though due to this characteristic, we rarely have conflicts among our team as we can always understand and go along with others’ perspective, it indeed had negative effect on our creative thinking and even the final result of our discussion outcomes. Despite those two problems, we still enjoy a cheerful learning journey. I see a lot of merits from my two lovely partners. For instance, they never haggle over the workload distributed to each other. Instead, they pay more attention to complete the tasks with high quality by reading a lot academic materials and the materials covered in our class as well.

Communication Effectiveness with Different Tools

After the first assignment, we seems cooperated better in the team and we get more used to the professor’s teaching philosophy. The most advantage we have compared with final project period is that we three can meet face to face and maintain a more effective communication process. Although nowadays we can select from a range of communication tools, the most effective way is still communication through face to face when we trying to work out a completed project. Especially, some of the communication tools with high technology seem provided a more convenient way but the fact is it also brings some new problems such as stability of the platform. To solve those problems are even more time consuming. Therefore, the three of us of discuss directly face to face and take notes during the process as well. In this way, we can get others feedback on our opinions immediately and this approach also can ensure our information will not be distortion through the communication process.

 With Evening Class Team-Chopsticks

Rational Reactions VS Emotional Reactions

When we collaborating with the evening team-Chopsticks in the final project, we feel exciting about the virtual organization thing. Our final project is building a new app, which called Bus & Breakfast. The main idea of that project is integrating the exist resource of both side-the KMB and HK style tea restaurants via virtual platform to achieve win-win situation and add value for both of them. 

 To completing our final project, we hold video meeting almost every Saturday since we got start. Speaking of the communication channel, as professor emphasized that do not meeting face to face, we took every step with the help of electronic devices and technology such as video meeting or e-mail. First we try to connect and discuss with each other just through e-mails. But we give it up soon due to its own weakness. They we change to use Skype, QQ and Whatsapp instead. The reason why we keep changing our communication channel is because there are much more obstacles than we think when we maintain this kind of collaboration. Previously we believe that we can pick anyone of these chatting tools but indeed it is not simple to find an appropriate one that works for every member. Thus, we kept changing the tools and adapt to our needs. That was one of the conflict point during our collaborating process because at that time we prefer different communication channels because Mainland China students and  Hong Kong students use different kinds of tools when chatting with others. We all believed that our own communication tools function better then the opposite side so we insisted to persuading others to change tools. Besides, a virtual team is harder to operate than a physical one is that information sharing tends to be insufficient easily. What’s worse, the feedback from others are quite limit. As we discussed in the class that virtual organization function well in some particular situation, however, we may lack of experience about maintain virtual teams because I do not think all of us express our opinions thoroughly. Especially we focus on the prepare process so that after we finished the job of a fixed period, we could rarely get feedback from others. Thus, no one in the team seems doing a well quality control. 

Video Meeting via Skype

From the conflict resolution model, we know well that a win-win situation is our common goal and we should continuously use negotiation skills to reach that point. Generally, the process concluded “avoid or evade”, “fight” and “compromise” situations during the discussing process. We often had different opinions towards one thing and consumed a plenty of time in dealing with those issues. I must admit that kind of thing are really frustrated us at that moment and hurt team morale as well. The dealing process was quite complicated since there is no clear boundary to distinguish right or wrong (or whose idea is better) about the answers to some open questions. Therefore, it takes tons of energy and time to prove an idea executable by figure out all the detailed information related to the issue. However, we never lose confidence in our team. Persuading others is not an easy thing to do after all. Fortunately, we keep our common goal in mind, which is reaching a win-win situation in this course, and try our best to reaction rationally. At last, we share a lot of knowledge and perspectives with each other and feel quite satisfied with our final project. Since the evening team (Chopsticks) joined us, we become a more completed team and that allowing us to perform better than before. As we know from the Cannikin Law that the capacity of a cask is determined by the shortest batten. The evening team makes up our weakness sot that we improve the performance of our team as a whole. All of them are familiar with Hong Kong culture and have working experience, these characteristics enable them work efficiently and with a more critical vision to judge all issues. Also, they have more knowledge about how to maintain effective and efficiency meetings via virtual platform. Another impressive point is that though many people have some creative ideas, but my teammates can turn the creative thinking into innovation ideas that can really carry out in the reality. Because despite the creative dimension, the ideas are quite useful and practical so that I believe that our project is meaningful instead of some unrealistic notions.

 This course really gives me a special experience of learning knowledge. It is totally different with other tratditonal course since it emphasize practice rather than theoretical learning. It encourages us to practice  collaboration skills in a real experience so that we can figure out the obstacles and problems in real cooperation. This kind of  methods are far more vivid and useful than just learning notions in the classroom and what we learned today from the High performance Collaboration course will continuously help us with our future career. 

Reference:

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