Question

Essay Questions for Business Communication ( answer should fill about one single-spaced page, times new roman 12 font, for a total of about 500 words )

1. What lessons about group work will you take away for the future, and how can you connect them to your professional goals?

Answer 1

During my post grad, I had worked with several groups. While it is not always easy to work in groups, group work does help in building skills and understanding which further helps the students in their professional life where work is hardly done in silos rather it requires collaboration from various departments to achieve a particular task or goal. We have always heard from our teachers and mentor that “Two or more heads are better than one”; “More hands make for lighter work” etc., these phrases are essentially true when working in groups.

Group projects helps in building skills in students which can help them in professional world like understanding diverse perspective, cultural differences, empathy, delegating tasks, handling feedback, challenge assumptions etc.

There are several learnings from group work that can help in the future:

• It helps in fostering collaboration and learning. In group work, people collaborate to provide ideas which reflect on their diverse experiences. These experiences can be learning for the different members of the group. This results in increasing of skills which working in silos happens rarely. By combining different ideas from the team members, team may be able to reach on a high potential solution which is difficult while working in silo.
• In a team, different members have different strengths; similarly in offices different people have different strengths. It is essential that in a group, we learn to leverage on the strengths of different people in order to provide solutions that are concrete. Experiencing and understanding this very aspect of group work can help students in their future. It also serves an opportunity to other team members to develop such strengths by following their peers on the process they follow
• In group work, team members rely a lot on each other in order to accomplish a task. This reliability helps in developing strong relationship between team members. It helps in building the trust which is required for team members to open up with each other and encourage each other during difficult times. The trust also helps in resolving minor conflicts which occurs. When working in a professional setup; we rely a lot on the other team members to finish a task on time. It is important to carry forward this learning to the future from group works
• To be an effective team member or a manager, it is important that you learn to resolve conflicts. In group work, different members have different working styles and different backgrounds which are natural to create conflicts. Handling conflicts at this stage helps a lot in handling conflicts in future

I aspire to be in a leadership role of an organization. I believe trust, collaboration and handling conflicts plays an important role in establish somebody as a leader. Organizations have people coming from varied backgrounds and as a leader, you are expected to leverage on the strengths of various members to give solution to the organizations that helps them grow in the market and establish them as a trusted organization.