March
29
Blog #9 – AISHA – Teamwork and Leadership
- What are the common personal goals within the members of your team, and how can you leverage those goals to build collaboration?
- Some common personal goals within members of my team include gaining more research experience for future career choices and seeing how interdisciplinary work can be done. These goals will help build collaboration as having the common goal of wanting more research experience will allow us to collaborate with this similar interest. Future potential career paths may be discussed and can be further explored as a topic in relation to the project. This will again hopefully lead to building more collaboration. Interdisciplinary work is inherently collaborative since you have to combine a lot of different fields to create the niche topic that you are studying. Due to this, our team will have to build upon our collaboration as many of our members have strengths in different fields, and sharing this knowledge is very important for interdisciplinary work.
- What are the common project goals within the members of your team, and how can you leverage those goals to make progress?
- As stated above, common goals include gaining more research experience for future career choices and seeing how interdisciplinary work can be done. These goals can be leveraged to make progress within our project as gaining research experience can only be done by doing the research itself. Therefore, in order to make this progress the research has to be ongoing by team members. Interdisciplinary work cannot happen with just one person. Since it involves more than one field, and hence, more than one person, creating progress with this goal looks like sharing strengths from each person’s knowledge of that field and seeing where specific progress within our project can be made.
- What are some biases that might become a barrier to your project goals?
- The false consensus effect and bangwaggon effect can both be biases that might become a barrier in our project goals. The bandwaggon effect, which is when one wants to “fit in” with the group, may happen but can be overcome by becoming more comfortable with the group in order to create open and honest communication. This is similar to the false consensus effect, as one can assume that others may have a similar idea to them, when they do not. Again, with trust and communication we may try to overcome this potential barrier in our project goals. Functional fixedness is a bias that could be a barrier in our project goals. Function fixedness is ” the tendency to see something or someone as possessing a very particular, fixed role”. This may happen when we split people into specific sub groups of tech and non-tech, which may force team members to view themselves as only within that specific role.
- What type of decision-making system will you use and why?
- When it comes to decision-making systems, we have different strategies for different areas. For instance, when it comes to deciding on a time to meet, it is almost always likely that at least one person’s availability does not match everyone else’s in such a large group. However, we do a majority rules decision-making style on this, as the one person can read over the meeting notes, and everyone else can still make it to the meeting. When it comes to decisions involving the project specifically, such as developing different uses of Alexa in the healthcare sphere, we typically use a unanimous decision-making system as everybody should be on board with what we are planning to do in terms of progress for the project.