Question:

Would you prefer to be in a team with teammates who are faster, more outspoken, and stronger in the subject as compared to yourself or would you prefer a team with teammates who are slower or less interested in the subject as compared to yourself? Justify. Which case would it be for your team today? What have you/your team mates done to reduce this learning gap?

Response:

I think I wouldn’t mind working in a team with a mixture of both. To me, there is actually a balanced of two different kinds of people in the team will make the team work better together.

Firstly, I would like to highlight the consequences and benefits of having a team filled with a group of people who are faster, more outspoken and stronger in the subject as compared to myself. At the end of the day, those of us who are faster, more outspoken and stronger in the subject would be cocky and wouldn’t want to share their intelligence with the rest of the group, resulting them to be out of the sight, not being able to catch up with what is going on in the team. On the other hand, there are benefits as when these people understand what is going on, they are bound to be able to complete the worksheet and problem statement faster, resulting us in taking a shorter time to complete the entire problem statement.

Secondly, I would like to highlight the consequences and benefits of having a team filled with a group of people who are slower and less interested in the subject as compared to myself. I think there are consequences for this. For these people who are slower, I wouldn’t mind explaining to them again and again until they understand the topic. Even if their interest doesn’t lie there, it really doesn’t matter to me. I think in this kind of scenario, the role that I have to play in the team is the mentoring role to them. To help them understand what we are doing in the team and increase their interest to the topic. As most of us know, a person’s interest to the topic arises from how the topic is delivered to them and how they see the person that delivers the topic to them. Hence, I would try to be a good mentor unto them and to deliver the topic to them to arise their interest.

As for me, I do want to work in a team that has a balanced view of 2. I do not mind having a group of people who are slower and less interested in the subject and I also do not mind to have a group of people who are more outspoken and stronger in the subject as compared to myself. To me, no matter you are stronger or weaker as compared to me in the subject, it doesn’t matter. All that matters to me is that all of us are willing to share our knowledge and help each other improve in the module.

For our team today, I seemed to be the fastest and strongest in the team in terms of the module today. For the rest, other than one of them, the rest of the team seemed to be slower than us. The approach that we took was to complete the entire worksheet first before explaining. If you can follow what we have been saying, good for you! If not, after we complete the worksheet, we would have to spend time reviewing the worksheet and preparing for our presentation. Hence, at that time a point, you could clarify all your doubts and uncertainties with regards to the topic. It would definitely be a good opportunity for me to explain to the team.

My personality is as such that I like to take on the mentoring role to teach them how they could go about answering the problem statement and to perfect their concepts. This would be a good ground for me to polish up on my weakness and the questions that they ask me will polish my foundations and to help me revise on what I had done. As such, like last week, I trust that when the next week approaches, I wouldn’t need to take much time in reviewing the questions that we did as I had already repeated it many times to my team mates who seemed to be confused. I also realised that in the process of me clarifying their doubts, I’m also able to improve on my steps and categorizing of the information in my head whenever I explain to them.

In conclusion, to me, it doesn’t matter what kind of people I am placed with as I have the patience to work on it and to work with others. There are different methods that I think we could adopt as time passes by and as we face with different groups of people. I trust that no matter what kind of people we are working with, it will definitely be a learning ground for us to be less subtle about the way we view others and even refining the way we work with others.