Achieving Team Synergy While Under Stress

Achieving team synergy is not an easy thing to accomplish. However, add the stress of a final proposal or a final presentation into the mix and achieving synergy is even harder than before. This is the struggle that my team has faced over the last week.

At the beginning of the term, we had a difficult time working together as a group because of our extremely different personalities and work styles. By the middle of the term, though, we had achieved some level of synergy and were beginning to work well together.However, the stress of this past week has caused the members of my team, especially me, to backtrack on our goals of making that synergy possible.

Throughout the term, my leadership development goals have been to enable others to act and to become more aware of other people’s emotions during group discussions. Over the last few weeks, I felt that I had improved in both of these areas and was beginning to do them without needing to think about them. The stress of the last week, though, has made it much more tempting to revert back to the habits of taking control of the group projects and not being aware of how this makes other people feel. For example, I have caught myself talking to much and not letting other people express their viewpoint during discussions. I have also fought for a couple of my ideas without really listening to the concerns of others and identifying what emotions those concerns are coming from.

In the grand scheme of things, the worst time for this to happen is right now during final proposal and presentation preparations. Everyone in my group is also feeling the stress of these final preparations and I am adding to that stress not relieving it. As a result, I am monitoring myself much more closely again to make sure that my habits do not revert back to the ones that I had at the beginning of the term. Hopefully, these actions will strengthen my leadership development goals throughout the last few weeks of the term and will contribute to a solid final presentation with my team.