This
morning I slept to a blissful 8am. That
does, however, include multiple late night/early morning awakenings from graduates
celebrating in the courtyard outside our rooms.
The Book of Kells was our morning activity, which ended up being
interesting but not earth-shattering. I
enjoyed learning about how the book was written/illustrated, and it really was
amazing to see the intricate illustrations of such an old document! Equally impressive was the old Trinity
library the Book is in. I LOVE the
double-high bookshelves lining the walls with ladders in each cubby to retrieve
top-shelf books. Those books obviously
aren’t for check-out anymore, but I imagine I could entertain myself for many
hours in there if they were. Sometime I’ll
make more time in my life for reading…oh the elementary days of checking out 10
books from the library one day, and taking ‘em back for more the next.
Dublin
was a bit rainy again this morning, but when we arrived in Maynooth the sun was
shining! I hurried out for a quick walk
to soak up some vitamin D, and as a bonus, got to see the lovely old buildings
of St. Patrick’s College. I do love the
architecture of old stone buildings – high steeples, big windows, stained glass…
Then it
was time to get back to work. Andrew,
our CEO, is heading to Spain tomorrow so we’re presenting in the morning
instead of Tuesday night. It’ll work out
well though, because that way he can give us feedback on what to spend the rest
of our time working on. It did mean
another late night as we worked on gathering final information and putting
together our 105-slide presentation! We
did take a break to grab dinner in a pub, and joined the locals cheering on
England in the EuroCup quarter finals. Unfortunately
Italy won…but that was long after we left to stare at our computers again.
We ran
into a leadership/group challenge today.
One of our teammates that doesn’t have a strong background in business was
struggling to provide relevant information for the sections they volunteered
for, and it was starting to impact our deliverable and the rest of our
schedules/assignments somewhat significantly.
I wasn’t quite sure how to handle it.
For our teamwork alignment document, we all agreed that we would be
upfront with each other and proactively address issues as they came up. But telling someone you’re frustrated because
you didn’t get to share your opinion is a bit of a different beast than telling
someone the quality of their work needs to be improved – especially since it’s
a peer-to-peer situation, not a boss-employee situation. The three of us most aware of and impacted by
the situation discussed how to handle it.
We decided that the person was probably trying so we could just ignore
it and keep covering/re-doing work, but that wouldn’t have benefitted anyone
involved – including the individual. It’s
not our responsibility to change anyone or make them fit into a cookie-cutter
work style (quite the contrary – a team should bring out and use people’s
unique abilities), but I think part of this experience is to learn from each
other and help each other as we can. And
we are responsible for producing a graduate-level deliverable.
So we decided to partner up on sections vs.
working individually, so as to demonstrate in a non-threatening way how we were
finding good material and drawing conclusions from it in a way that directly
answered the questions Andrew posed to us.
This seemed to help somewhat, but I’m wondering if there would have been
a better way to approach it. We were
trying to keep in mind that we were under a very tight deadline, and needed to
address the situation in a way that kept the flow of work moving…anyway, it was
a good learning experience. I can tend
to just pick up slack and take more work on myself rather than “hurt someone’s
feelings” or cause a big disruption when it’s a peer-to-peer situation, but by talking
it through with my teammates, we were able to come up with something that we
hope ended up being more productive (and learning) for everyone involved.
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