Blog #1 - Communication and Team Behaviour

Communication occurs two ways between two or more people verbally and non-verbally. It can be understood differently by different people based on their experiences and knowledge. In this blog, I will be recording and analyzing the observations of my team’s discussions from my perspective.

To begin with, I observed that my team has exhibited an important principle of effective communications, active listening. My team dedicates full attention to the speaker who is sharing his ideas. While listening to the speaker, team members respect the speaker by demonstrating positive body language such as nodding and giving eye contact. After the sharing session, questions are asked to clarify doubts or main points are rephrased to affirm the meaning. Most importantly, at any one time, there is only one speaker. Though the team did not set this ground rule, team members intuitively comply with it.

In addition, my teammates participate in meetings very actively. They are prepared to share their ideas and thoughts. They are also willing to listen to others’ opinions and internalize it. As such, many interesting ideas are proposed thus, the discussions are successful.

Nevertheless, it is inevitable that every team will face difficulties. During the first meeting, the team struggled with the focus of the meeting. There was a slight dispute over whether the team should focus on graphic user interface or the features to be implemented in the project. I was astonished when Yu Kai mentions that the team should focus on the features in a serious tone with a straight face as I perceived that as anger. The team responded in a normal tone hence it did not lead to a serious disagreement. The team came to an agreement of focusing on features as it forms the foundation for designing systems based on Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC); a process of creating systems.

I also observed that our first meeting took longer than expected as more time is necessary to complete the discussions and settle administrative matters. Furthermore, the team went off topic to talk about other assignments of CS2103T module. It is also hard to allocate tasks due to insufficient understanding of individual team members. From this, I realized that my team is lack of a systematic way to handle meetings.

To conclude, I have gained a better understanding of my teammates through the discussions we had. I noticed that everyone has their own way of expressing their thoughts through verbal and non-verbal communications. In the case of Yu Kai, speaking in a serious tone and straight face is his normal way of communicating with others. While Zhenyang nods his head and smile when he agrees to a certain idea.

Also, I am grateful for my teammates’ willingness to comprise their break times for meetings despite their busy schedules. For this reason, I would like to propose three improvements to reduce ineffective discussions. Firstly, we need to settle administrative matters and lay the pipelines for communicating and sharing documents as soon as possible. Secondly, we need to allocate a time keeper to ensure that meetings are not over run. Lastly, we need to allocate a person to keep the team focus on the topics for discussion.