Running head: REFLECTION ON GROUP MEMBERSHIP

A personal reflection on group membership and group dynamics David Owens-Hill Queens University of Charlotte January 27, 2011

REFLECTION ON GROUP MEMBERSHIP

A lifelong fear of small groups I have, for as long as I can remember, been afraid of other people. Not in a crippling, hide in the house all day kind of way, but the fear exists in enough of a continuous manner that I am aware of it. I would imagine that it stems from a fear of public speakingafter all, what is group communication if not speaking to a small publicbut I think the root cause in its totality is less one-dimensional. This feeling makes group and small team interaction difficult, and requires coping strategies for effectiveness. In spite of these feelings, or perhaps because of my hypersensitivity to them, I have learned how best to represent myself in small groups, and how to function within them. It would be unfair to portray myself as an agoraphobic mute, hiding from the roles and responsibility of communication. I work through my dislike of group situations oneby-one, and see this as a parable to the overall workings of group dynamics. The nature of groups is that we must all contribute, but to do so effectively we must first evaluate the type of contribution we are comfortable making; the type of contribution that we can sustain over the duration of our membership.

A dysfunctional team My career trajectory has taken me through the nonprofit sector for just under a decade. I entered the field at the end of a very prosperous time for philanthropies and nonprofits and have weathered a recession and the 2009-10 economic meltdown. I survived these economic disasterswhile many of my colleagues and coworkers careers

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in the field endedprimarily because my agency had highly successful small teams and groups. My most recent non-educational role was as a project manager and program manager at an artist residency center. Our staff of fifteen was small enough to be considered a small group (using the definition of a collection of 3-20 members aligned to a similar goal), but we were further subdivided ourselves organizationally into rolerelated small teams. I worked on a program team, which was responsible for artist residencies and exhibitions in the centers gallery space. I cross-reported (if memory served, with a dotted line on the organizational chart) to the team responsible for visual communication and marketing. My subdivided teams were made of 4 members and 3 members respectively. Both teams were prepared for success; we had the resources, skills, and time necessary to do build strong arts programming at our center and to market ourselves to external audiences in a manner encouraging fiscal and philosophical patronage. But we consistently failed. While we recruited some of the most talented contemporary artists to fill our studios and exhibit in our galleries, AND we continually built our marketing program resulting in increased donations, but we never succeeded in communicating successfully with one another to optimize our efforts, reduce duplicative work, and reach up to that magical gestalt on which hyper-effective teams rely to propel themselves forward faster than they could go alone. There are things that I know to be true about Organizational Communication. One is that people want to talk to one another; they need to talk to one another. Without this basic premise, all manner of communication theory breaks down. Our problem was one

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that plagued small groups of people foreverwe didnt like one another. Though our mission was aligned and we all had positive intent, there was an interpersonal barrier that went unaddressed and thus unresolved for the duration of my time at this organization. Our communication with one another was clipped, occasionally unnecessarily sharp and, most importantly, perfunctory. Only when groups are able to transcend interpersonal barriers can they begin to optimize their efforts via synergy. Id like to say that we ultimately realized the error of our ways and corrected the flawed dynamic that we constructed for our groups, but we didnt. Instead we continued doing only as much as needed to be done to accomplish a lowly goal. In hindsight, my personal feelings towards groups played a significant role. I didnt like working within the marketing group, of which I was a member, specifically because I didnt feel that I was represented well within this group. The leader of the group routinely spoke over me, dismissed any contributions I made to the groups collective voice, and occasionally ignored me completely. She wasnt an ineffective leader, but had little time for people who were not as assertive in conversation as she. The general thinking was if you have something important to say, youll say itwe wont have to invite you to speak. When I realized that this was a primary friction-point for small group interaction, I began to work on increasing my comfort speaking in groups and recognize this as an important part of group communication.

Small, non-work, groups I belong to many, many groups, most of them are successful, functional, and offer some sort of personal reward for membership. For example, I am a member of

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professional groups that promote my career and build relationships with like-minded designers and nonprofit employees; I am a member of at least one social support group that will one day make me a better person by helping me curb a bad-habits; I am a member of a close-knit group of friends in Charlotte that self-selected as a homosexual minority in a conservative city; and I am a member of a small, close familial unit that requires constant nurture and tending. My style of interaction in all of the above groups is vastly different and provides an interesting point of analysis for my overall position in society in a moment in time. I have become very aware recently of exactly how involved we are in the social construction of reality. I recall, when I first learned this theory, thinking that it sounded pretty neat, kind of ethereal, and like something that I had been peripherally involved in but with no direct connection. I compared it to votingI voted regularly, but never expected my single act of voting to alter the outcome of an entire election in one-way or another. But I was wrong. Through mutual friendships, I have seen some of my social groups closing in on one another. They are intersecting, and I am seeing that I have (subconsciously) employed a different style of communication in each setting.

Concluding with group dynamics I understand group dynamics as important to the nature of groups, but also understand the dynamics as an important mechanism to contextualize groups. The way the people interact within a group defines its role externally and internally (separately) and the ways groups interact with one another define their role in the hierarchy of group-

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dom. Like bubbles in a boiling pot, formal and informal groups bump into one another, and fervently move to and fro, existing separately and together all at once. As I reflect on my role in groups, both successful and not, I realize that I did not understand, until recently, the notion of not being able to not contributeby being in a group, even as a passive member, one affects change on the group. By contributing to the groups we are in, we contribute to the whole. As our groups expand outwards through the systems of communication, our contributions are dispersed into other groups. If Systems Theory is accurate and communication systems are permeable, our contributions to small group dynamics will eventually be spread, diluted but intact, through other communication systems. Just as you cant not communicate, groups cant not affect change on other groups. Such is the beauty of membershipwe get to be a part of systemic change, and we get to do it by interacting with only a manageable handful of like-minded people.