Julie Agerbeek

Rarely will it happen that one gets along with everyone in a (project) group. I'd had struggles in groups before, but never quite like this project. In last term's project, I struggled with communicating with one specific team member. They almost never showed up and refused to listen to any comments. All my normal ways of approaching their lack of presence or motivation, didn't seem to be able get trough to them. It was during this project, that I really got a masterclass in communicating with different people. What I had to learn, was that I needed to adjust the way I communicated and dive deeper into different communication and leadership techniques. My original way only pushed the team member away, while changing my approach could have solved the problem sooner.

The project was two weeks. We had to create an Arcade style game with controller and all. Generally, the team was made up of skilled and motivated artists and engineers. However, we quite quickly noticed an issue with the other designer. They were always late, and when they did show up, they would mostly hang out with other groups. As the only active designer and designated team lead, I was the one to try and tackle this issue. I started by just telling them that they should come back to where we were working and give them a general task. Later attempts, such as being more strict and direct, only seemed to drive them further away. While venting to a friend, they suggested I should just sit them down and have an honest and understanding conversation about the situation.

That lead me to two solutions which ended up actually helping. The first solution was to initially talk to them one on one and then with the team. During both talks the goal was to make both sides really express in a face to face, and objective but direct conversation, what the issues were that were stopping them from participating, being motivated or responding to the team. For this particular situation, those talks brought a few major issues forward, which explained partly why the other designer was acting the way they were.

The second solution came from that first one on one talk with the other designer. They expressed that they felt lost in all that needed to be done and felt overwhelmed. They chose to not tell anyone but just to distance themselves from the project. During the one on one talk, this lead us to agree that they would try to come to me or another team member if they felt overwhelmed or didn't know what to do, and I would try to check in more often as well as be more clear as to what was expected of them.

These methods have stuck with me and are something I still very actively deploy in all teams I work in (Jun, 2023).