Aaron Whites Group Process Evaluation/Analysis

Aaron White
UNC Greensboro

LIS 650

Dr. Julia Hersberger

April 15, 2013

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To begin our first group meeting, we agreed to move from clunky Blackboard to
smoother GoogleDocs. Once there, H.M. shared a document shed written, offering a
rundown on the assignment structure and some selections from our assigned readings that
might be targeted to Pennys issues. This became the palimpsest upon which wed
eventually write our finished paper, taking it through many changes along the way. We
discussed the division of labor in our group. The paper was to have four sections
(description, diagnosis, prescription, evaluation); how would we split four parts six ways?
K. B. suggested that we boil Pennys mess of problems down to three underlying
problems, then divide into subgroups of two people each, with each subgroup tackling
one problem. We didnt have an agreed-upon list of key problems yet, so we began
spitballing ideas and opinions about Pennys issues, with some suggested solutions tossed
in, perhaps sooner than was advisable. There was broad agreement that time
management was one of Pennys key trouble spots. I began advocating for my pet idea;
Penny should delegate training to the subordinates themselves, giving them the challenge
of learning and teaching new tech as a group. The fact that I never swerved from this
idea throughout the process, despite a lack of enthusiasm from my teammates, suggests
that I leapt to a conclusion and failed to give full consideration to other options; but the
fact that none of my teammates challenged the idea suggests that it was a solid enough
idea, and that I built a good case for it. Either that, or groupthink kept anyone from
challenging me on an ide fixe that didnt directly impact anyone elses patch of
teamwork turf.
K. B. repeated her plan: three problems, three groups of two people each. This repetition
of ideas that no one had commented on seemed to get the idea through; we boiled our list
of problems down to three, then selected topics that appealed to us.
We generally agreed that communication was, like time management, a basic problem.
K. B. suggested that communication could be subdivided into communication with
Sheldon, and communication with the subordinates Pennys tasked with training. Later,
she would add these three items to our document as a list of subgroups.
Incidentally, it was around this time that we experienced something that would quietly
occur throughout our team meetings: someone bowing out, at least for a time, to handle
other matters like tending to children. It was never a big deal; with six people, in a
virtual environment, things didnt fall through if one person had to leave. Over the
course of our meetings, members would note that they had to step out, then leave, and
often return, as business carried on. Our group was large enough to continue working
through individual short-term absences, and small enough for everyone to have a sense of
who everyone was and what they were doing.
There was some crosstalk as we tossed ideas around, but our discussions converged as we
went through a few other topics people had in mind. Would it be productive to relieve
Penny of some of her responsibilities? We dismissed this notion, on the grounds that it
would probably leave Penny feeling rebuked, and besides, shed probably just make up
the difference by wringing more OCD goodness out of whatever was left (note her ability
to demonstrate Parkinsons Law with her morning emails.) We discussed some of the
ideas we liked from our class readings that might help Penny (team building exercises

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and personality testing were mentioned.) We also talked about training and meetings; we
discussed Pennys loathing of group situations where shes not the one talking, the
importance of time keeping and lunch breaks, and the applicability of team building and
personality testing to these kinds of workplace activities. We decided to create a list of
questions for Penny, and after spending a little time on the task, we agreed to make the
list of questions our homework for the week, adding our suggested questions to our
Googledoc. Wed finish the questions by Thursday, and mail them to Penny, c/o Dr.
Hersberger.
With some uncertainty as to the length of the final report (Syllabus: 5-7 pages. Case
study: 2-3 pages) we agreed that wed made a good start. We agreed to add our questions
for Penny to our Googledoc; we were ready to start working on a focused task.
Two other decisions that structured our group activities: D. J. began saving the chats and
posting them in a separate Googledoc; and we agreed that our next meeting would be
after class again on Monday. We would stick to these after-class meetings (or in place of
class when there was no Monday class session,) and those chat transcripts became the
lynchpin of, at the very least, this paper.
Our next meeting, after class on March 25th, began with some anticipation of Pennys
answers to our questions. We spent an inordinate amount of time handwringing about the
answers, the answers, where were the answers? It turned out that for the time being Dr.
Hersberger had simply given us a caution that Penny might not have very helpful
answers. This provoked a lot of confusion. Dr. Hersberger replied? So where are the
answers?
While we were cooking up questions for Penny, K. B. quietly crafted a list of Pennys
three key problems: time management, communication with Sheldon, and
communication with her trainees. K. B. assured us shed be fine with any changes, but
we instantly accepted this list. It was only upon rereading the transcripts for this paper
that I realized that, though theoretically we were a self-managed group, we had an
unofficial team leader: K. B. And she was a very good leader, focusing our attention on
workable ideas without ever arm-twisting or glory-hogging. I still believe her iteration of
the three key problems won instant acceptance, not because we were too intellectually
lazy to challenge it, but because it elegantly solved the problem of whittling Pennys
problems down to a manageable list that embraced the diversity of Pennys issues. I
suppose mental health might have been a fourth category, but we decided to stick to our
mandate; this is a management class, not a psychology class.
A. M. and I were the first to settle into a subgroup, since we both expressed an interest in
Pennys relations with subordinates. We began discussing this topic, while the other team
members discussed dividing up the remaining topics. I was chastened to read the
transcription of this discussion a few weeks later; at first it looked like I was engaged in
oblivious crosstalk, but I realized it was consistent with our decision to subdivide the
group. A. M. and I were moving on to the business of our subgroup, while the others
went about deciding on their subgroups, after which point they too would be free to move
to the subgroup topics.

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There was also more hair-pulling about the Penny answers that werent; we just couldnt
wrap our minds around the fact that Dr. Hersbergers initial reply to our questions wasnt,
in fact, the answers. Had Helen (the point woman for the question emails) failed to send
us the entire response? Was there a part 2 to Dr. Hersbergers message that had gotten
dropped in the copying? Im not sure this in-retrospect-comical confusion counts as
storming in the Progressive Model of Group Development scheme, since it wasnt an
existential threat that challenged our groups reason for being or working methods, but it
felt a bit stormy at the time.
K. B., the team superego, put us back on track. So we have three weeks until this is due.
What kind of timeline do we see moving ahead? We had several ideas (including
reviewing Pennys as-yet nonexistent answers), but soon we agreed that our goal for the
next meeting should be to work in our subgroups to offer some prescriptions based
around the three problems. We also discussed citations, agreeing that there didnt seem to
be a mandatory citations format mentioned in the syllabus, but that APA was acceptable
to the group as long as it was acceptable to Dr. Hersberger.
We also discussed the matter of length; our subgroup responses would need to average a
single page in length each in order to fit the 3 page total. Some members were concerned
about this; such brevity seemed like a challenge. After some more confused attempts to
find answers from Penny in an email that contained no answers from Penny, we called
it a night.
Over the week I continued reviewing our class readings to find keys to Pennys problems.
I found the selections from Gordon most applicable to the subject of training
subordinates, and I started making notes to share with A. M. on what I thought might be
the most fruitful ideas for Penny to implement.
A shadow hanged over our April First meeting: Dr. Hersbergers warning against making
assumptions about the text shook up several members of our group. I was pretty
confident that Id read and reread the case study with a sufficiently close, strict
constructionist reading to minimize unfounded assumptions, but I knew I was only
human, and ought to give the case study one more careful going over, just to be sure. Our
group found this to be a particularly challenging time to consider the possibility that we
might be making baseless assumptions, because we were forced to consider it at the same
time that we discussed our provisional prescriptions (still works in progress) for Penny.
By now wed really gotten Dr. Hersbergers answers to our questions, and we hoped
theyd serve as talismans to ward off unwarranted assumptions; of course, they were also
an additional text that could be misread as easily as the case study itself. We found them
a bit worrying, since they suggested that any plan for fixing Pennys problems could be
countered by Sorry, Pennys too cray-cray for that to work. Apollonian solutions to
Dionysian problems can be frustrating that way. The three-page limit on the group report
also worried us; we decided to keep it as bare bones as possible. I was a little
embarrassed by our presentation to the group; my portion of it was entirely too chatty and
informal, since Id intended them purely as initial notes to A. M., from which we could
proceed to write a finished version. In the context of our new devotion to verbal austerity
in the service of page limits, it was obvious that some serious editing was in order if I

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were to get our stuff down from two pages to one. K. B. put it well: if we can try and
cluster several together and consider them as symptoms of a bigger problem (without
inferring too much!) then I think we'll come up with nice lean prescription sections.
In the course of this meeting, something got deleted from our Googledoc; whoever did it
was unaware or too embarrassed to admit to it, but A. M. showed us that in Googledocs it
was possible to undo edits. The central role GoogleDocs played in our workflow is hard
to overrate, and it was good to have someone on board who knew the finer points.
Danisha asked why a control freak like Penny would allow email to overwhelm her day; I
answered with an inordinate amount of gossip about someone I know who is rather like
Penny in this way: a control freak who thinks she has to control other peoples problems,
so other people drop their problems in her inbox , and she compulsively accepts their
problems as her problems to handle by herself. I felt guilty about it after I wound down; I
had probably fallen into several of the negative Individual roles on the Figure 6-3
checklist in Gordon. I was going for Information Giver, but ended up more as Clown,
and possibly Dominator. I need to rein in my urge to be an improv comic when its not
about me.
A. M. and I worked on our portion of the group paper in a separate Googledoc, making
use of the Comments option to ask each other questions. Past a certain point there was
nothing left to do but hack it down to size. At first this was a matter of finding more
concise ways to express ideas; I had written about various theories from our reading,
including cheat-sheet summaries. Eventually I accepted that we didnt have space to
brief Penny on every detail of Life-Cycle/Situational Theory, and would have to skip to
the most relevant aspects. We proceeded to kill our darlings, dropping what we thought
were on-point ideas, making tough judgment calls about which of our collected ideas was
really the best. Once the team reconvened on April 8th, we found that our section of the
paper had become the shortest. That didnt last, as we collaborated in GoogleDocs to tidy
and trim the paper down to three pages while retaining as much content as possible, and
smoothing the readability.
April 9th, K. B. emailed us to say shed emailed Dr. Hersberger about citation format, and
then finished the citations herself.
On April 13th, we convened for the last time. K. B. called the question on writing a
concluding summary. At first there was some agreement to this, but I objected that we
were running a bit long, and with such a short paper, even Penny should be able to handle
the amount of material we conveyed without needing a summary. We dropped the
summary idea. Id learned a technique from K. B.; simply being willing to give voice to
an idea or belief can be the fulcrum for change.
So we spent an hour or so carefully rereading our article, finding formatting booboos and
inconsistencies between sections, then groupsourcing the revision of awkward phrasings.
Fixing sentences was much easier with six people pitching in. Soon we were ready to
declare the paper finished.

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So what did I learn? Aside from the refresher in group theory that I got from rereading
class materials, I learned something about leadership. The after-the-fact discovery that
wed had a leader without knowing it came as an intriguing surprise. Our group had been
genial, but a friendly group isnt necessarily an effective group. K. B.s gentle but firm
pushes kept us on track. Having good ideas and solid judgment helped, but asserting her
ideas in a clear, low-key fashion got her a long way. Perhaps shed have faced some
pushback if someone else in the group had wanted to be leader, but this group was too
easy-going. While the group stakes were pretty high (we all wanted a good grade) they
werent stratospheric; theres only so much glory, laud and honor well get from a
successful paper.
I also found that GoogleDocs, which Id never used before, makes it easy for multiple
authors to cobble a group paper together. I expect Ill be using it or something like it
whenever Im involved in a group paper. We were able to work together without stepping
on each others toes. If someone had a concern about part of the paper, marginal
comments and chat provided multiple ways to solicit feedback, assistance, and
permission to make changes.
I dont have any big regrets about my contribution to the group. I think I tended to let my
fixation on wordplay get in the way of communication, perhaps because I feel more
comfortable parading what I regard as my cleverness than I do actually buckling down to
work. I think I provided real value to the team, though, by digging up a lot of gold from
our readings about leadership theory, and by writing and editing our section on how
Penny could work with her trainees (very much in collaboration with A. M., who was an
equal partner.)
This was the best group project Ive ever worked on. A savvy leader, a collaborative
team mindset, and the tools that permit collaboration to flow with ease, all came together
to make it a project to remember as a model for future group projects.