On Monday 11/16, I attended a workshop through the Emerging Leaders Program on how to be an effective team member and a better team member when working on a group project. Through the workshop everyone was required to talk and say anything such as what bothered them, what they could do better to be a better group member, suggestions as to how an effective group project should go, and potential problems the group may face during the duration of the project. I thought this workshop was very informative and interesting, and extremely helpful because I learned that there are always ways to be a better group member, even when you think that already are.

During the workshop there was also an interesting point that was brought up which was the difference between a team and a group, since some of the people in attendance were on sports teams. The main difference between the two is that a team is all working together to achieve a common goal, while a group everyone works together but each group member's goal may be slightly different than the other group members. Additionally, a team has more unity to it as it is together for  much longer period of time since a sports season usually lasts longer than the typical group project. I had never thought about the difference between a group and a team since I usually think of both as the same thing, but now know there is a slight difference between the two.

Another part of the workshop was actually splitting off into small groups to apply everything that was discussed and see how we all would do in a small group setting. The task for each small group was to discuss how we would go about building anything out of a box of legos that was distributed to each group without opening the box or touching any of the pieces. However we could look at the instruction manual to get some kind of idea what could be built. After discussing the plans on what to build and how to build it each group had a minute to try and put the plan together and build something to see how effective each group would actually be at working together. My group attempted to work on building a tower but only got done with the bottom part of it. By the end of the exercise each group realized that working in teams can be a lot harder than it looks but learned how to be more effective team and group members.