Being the coach
I was acting as a coach for Phuong and he told me an
interesting story about how he taught that he would get along well with
somebody that he knew but they did not match at all. He had a group work for
one course and there was this one girl who was also Vietnamese in the group. He
assumed that they would get along really well since they knew each other
beforehand, she had always been really helpful and they also shared the same
language and cultural background. However, they ended up having different
opinions on everything and were fighting constantly who was the leader of the
team. Disputing things obviously consumed a lot of energy so Phuong tried to
argue his ideas better and to integrate the girl’s ideas into the work. Even
though their teamwork did not go so smoothly, luckily they ended up with good
grades.
I think it was really great that Phuong tried to make an
effort to make everything work better with them too. He realized that he had
made a bad judgment of their abilities to work well together and was trying to
adjust his own behavior to make up for this. Sometimes it is really hard to
choose your teammates if you have not worked with them before. You either do
not know them or you know them from other things and you assume that they are
the same in every situation. We could even say that there is a halo effect when
you assume that your friends will be also good teammates even though this is
not true all the time.
I think the coaching session went pretty well. I did not have
to ask that many questions as a coach because I think Phuong already knew where
he jumped to conclusions that were not correct after all. It was really nice
discussing about his story because it also gives me an opportunity to learn
more about how people think and behave.
Being the coachee
Muriel
coached me and our discussion helped me to realize that I try to avoid
conflicts too much. In the situation that we were discussing I did not want to
confront our chairperson and ask for help since I believed that she would not
be willing to help me out. Muriel pointed out that this could have been also do
to the fact that I wanted live up to the expectations of the chairperson and
asking for help would have been admitting that I can do it by myself. I think
she was right with that remark. When I started working as the member of the
committee I got a feeling that she only cared about the project but not about
the committee members and I trusted too much on this feeling without
questioning it. I started noticing all the things she did that supported my
assumptions and did not do anything to experiment whether I was right with
those assumptions. I could have had a lot less stress if I had just asked her
for help that she would have probably given me. I am happy that I learned from
that experience and our coaching session that I am not always right about
people and I should learn to ask people for help if I need it. The most likely
scenario is that the others just do not realize that you need help unless you
ask for it.
Probably
in the future I have to learn to ask myself whether I made judgments too
hastily without actually thinking them through. I should start questioning my
assumptions and make experiments to see whether I was right or not. For example
in the situation I described I should have asked for help once and drawn
conclusions only if she had refused to help me.
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