Although Reynolds Walker Walton has shown effective collaborative work on projects in the past, it has recently shown to be inconsistent in doing so. After conducting research on effective groupwork, I have come up with two recommendations that will lead to consistent projects that effectively achieve the overall goal.
First, I recommend that there is an equal distribution of work. Don’t give all the hard work to the leaders, or smartest people in the group. Be the leader that sees the skills in others, and collaboratively distribute the work evenly. My second recommendation is to create a diverse group that sets goals and has a shared mindset. Make an overall goal, and then to reach that goal, it is vital to make smaller goals that gradually carve the path to that collaborative goal. Now, I will elaborate on how both of my recommendations improve the consistency of Reynolds Walker Walton Senior Management.
Going into depth on my first recommendation, I suggest that before you conduct any work at all, plan and assign individual tasks. This not only makes everyone active, it avoids stressing only a few individuals on doing most of the work. Being a leaders means you must conduct more collaborative work by “mapping the supply and demand in their organizations and redistributing the work more evenly among their employees, and by incentivizing people to collaborate more efficiently”.
The next step to this is how to incentivize your fellow group members to doing their work well and on time. To do so, there must be optimistic norms set by the leaders in the group and agreed on by the members. Regardless of setting these norms, the members of your group, including the leaders, will have a natural tendency to be lazy, procrastinate, and blame the fault on others. All of these are examples of destructive dynamics. So, maybe you’re wondering how avoiding these dynamics can be reinforced. The answer to this is to set a reward system.
Whether it’s a monetary reward, recognition, or a promotion, the work will be much more concise then without a reward system. Next, I will expand on my recommendation on being a team leader and how it will help collaborative projects stay more consistent. Being a leader requires having minimal selfishness. Effective leaders that exemplify willingness to share knowledge and help their fellow coworkers, tend to “drive team performance, ” compared to the employees that are not as willing to drive collaborations”.
When picking leaders for these collaborative projects, pick individuals that have a desire to help others learn. There will be members of the project who struggle with their work, and not all of them are willing to ask for help. Observant leaders can tell when their peers are struggling, and approach them with a helping mindset. This is very effective for even distribution of work, so I highly recommend you look out for these characteristics. Now I will shift to my second recommendation and explain how it will help groupwork for Reynolds Walker Senior Management stay consistent. Having a diverse group of individuals working on a collaborative project has been proven to be more effective than having a group of very similar people with very similar interests. According to Duhigg, Julia Rozovsky found much more success with a diverse, online study group, than she did with her previous study group consisting of similar people with similar interests (2016). Placing yourself with people like yourself causes everyone to be more competitive and many can find oneself in an overly critical state. Instead, focus on making a diverse group because while working with diversity, there is a “shared mindset”. This means that there is a “common identity and common understanding”. This will lead the way to set an overall goal, and smaller goals along the way that make stepping stones leading up to that main goal. These diverse group projects work smoothly and respect each other are more rapid because with more people analyzing the work, mistakes and the overall solution to a problem are found faster.
Although projects aren’t a race, finishing it in a timely manner before the due date is never a problem to have for it gives everyone in the group time to work on other tasks. Diverse groups are key, so allow me to expand more on how they cause collaborative projects to increase consistency in the workplace. When choosing collaborative groups, it is important to include a mix of races and gender. Diverse groups set aside socially impacted thinking and tend to focus more on facts. In a Psychological study issued by Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, “Scientists assigned 200 people to six-person mock jury panels whose members were either all white or included four white and two black participants. The people were shown a video of a trial of a black defendant and white victims. They then had to decide whether the defendant was guilty”.
There were also groups of people with the same gender and race. After conducting this social experiment, the groups that consisted of diversity focused more on facts related to the case and made fewer mistakes than those groups with uniform members (2016). When conducting business collaborative projects, members are supposed to focus on facts, and not as much opinion. I advise you to make diverse groups to make this more of a guarantee that they will collaborate and focus on factual detail. Also, don’t forget to include an even distribution of gender. According to an article written by Anita Wooley, Thomas W. Malone, and Christopher Chabris, women tend to be better at “mind reading, ” and teams with more women tend to “outperform teams with more men” (2015). This proves that teams which consist of racially and gender mixed, will outperform homogenous groups and result in more consistency in collaborative projects.
Now allow me to tie my two recommendations together and explain how both will increase workflow and consistency in your group projects. I advise Reynolds Walker Senior Management to take both recommendations I have presented into great consideration for you will see much improvement in collaboration projects. Start off by picking leaders who will effectively choose groups that consist of an even mix of race and gender. This will cause for more factual evidence, and rapid success. Next, set a plan that leads to an overall goal and even distribution of work amongst the group members. Keep in mind to avoid criticism and instead, optimistically motivate your team members. I highly suggest you contemplate both of my recommendations and hope to see your collaborative projects blossom with consistency.
