Everest Communication Skills

Introduction

This report will examine the progress and improvement of my communication and teamwork skills throughout the semester. This will be investigated through comparing my results of both the Everest simulation tasks, particularly in relation to not only my strengths and weaknesses of these skills in terms of what worked well and what did not work so well, but also how these weaknesses were improved. In addition, this report will not only make use of peer feedback received from my group members to further illustrate my improvement, but will also analyse the effectiveness of the strategies set out in my first management plan and whether they contributed to my improvement and development of these skills. Finally, this report will provide

My poor communication in terms of goal setting and planning can is further seen in Appendix C, which displays how my group members rated me an average of 2.8 in this area. In addition, another disadvantage of group decision making that we experienced was groupthink. In Henningsen’s writing, he discusses the symptoms of groupthink and argues that collective rationalisation and the pressure to conform are two symptoms of groupthink. We experienced these symptoms of groupthink as a result of poor communication and teamwork skills, because as a team we did not make our decisions rationally, we automatically agreed with the decisions put forward by the leader and failed to challenge these decisions by offering other alternatives or options. Moreover, we also felt the pressure to conform to these decisions because we were in the mindset of finishing the simulation and therefore did not want to delay the process any

Frances Baum argues that the use of the Devil’s advocate method reduces groupthink as it, “stimulates creativity, controversy, reflects different perspectives, helps ask questions in a different way and introduces new questions to avoid groups arriving at premature solutions.” I found that this strategy achieved just as Baum communicated in her writing, because it stimulated conversation and encouraged communication for not only myself, but also my other team members. However, when implementing this strategy, I referred back to our team contract that we created at the beginning of the semester, which can be found in Appendix C. Although we did not revise this contract as a team in any of the simulations, I thought it was important when implementing this strategy that I refer to the contract to ensure that the questions or statements that I made, fitted within these guidelines. The improvement of my communication skills, due to this change in behaviour, can be seen in Appendix C, which displays the feedback that I received from my group members in the first simulation. These results illustrate how I received a rating of 4 for my communication (speaking) and a 3.8 for my communication (listening); however, Appendix D displays my results for the second simulation and