Collaboration is an essential skill for both college and the workplace. You’ll often be asked to work on group projects throughout your college career, such as the one you will complete for ENGL 115. In most workplace settings, work is often done as a team effort; you and your co-workers will collaborate to meet the goals and needs of your employer. For these reasons, it’s important that you learn how to contribute positively as a member of a team. In this chapter, we’ll discuss some reasons for collaboration, the steps to a successful collaboration, ways to navigate conflict within a team, and how to write as a team.

As we do so, keep in mind that successful collaboration does not simply mean delegating responsibilities and then completing tasks on your own to be later assembled. It means leveraging the strongest skills of each member of your group to build a team that works as a cohesive whole. Successful collaboration is a process in which every team member participates based on their abilities and the needs of the project.

Reasons to Collaborate

You may roll your eyes when you hear the words “group project,” and you may have had  negative experiences with group projects in the past. But there are many very good reasons to collaborate beyond “my instructor said I have to.” Collaboration is consistently ranked as one of the top skills that employers look for in new college graduates starting out their careers. And beyond that very practical concern, collaboration in class helps develop several other skills, such as:

• Developing, changing, or clarifying ideas and perspectives through discussion
• Developing critical thinking skills
• Enhancing communication skills
• Developing skills in group problem-solving
• Generating a broad array of points of view, solutions, and approaches to a problem
• Giving you a chance to work on a project that is too complex for an individual
• Giving you a chance to teach one another

Collaboration is fundamentally based on the notion that group members will bring their individual areas of expertise to a collaborative project and produce stronger work than any one of them could have done by working alone. And unlocking the full potential of collaboration requires developing a work process that keeps all team members coordinated and working together.

Steps to Successful Collaboration

The success of a collaborative project begins with defining strategies to establish an effective and productive workflow for the project. At a minimum, team members need to initially agree on the following:

• How do we get started?
• What do we do in a meeting?
• How do we stay on track?

How to Get Started

The first step to a successful collaboration happens the moment your team comes together. The first thing that you should do is introduce yourselves and exchange contact information, including the best means and times for contact. Communication is crucial in any collaboration.

After the team is introduced, you can begin to consider the project and the team’s workflow. Here are some tips for what to do in the early stages:

• Pro tip:

  It’s always best to set your own team deadlines that are before the class deadlines to ensure that the work is done and give time to proofread and mesh styles.

   

  Go through the project and its deliverables (drafts, review tasks, etc.) to make sure everyone understands what’s expected.

• Lay out some ground rules about meetings, communication, and deadlines
  • o How often will you meet? Where? How?
  • o How will you communicate? What is unacceptable communication? How will you keep communication on task?
  • o What are the deadlines for the project? How will you meet these?
• Clearly define team member roles and responsibilities.
  • o What are each member’s strengths and weaknesses? Be honest!
  • o What experience and background does each member have?
  • o Be sure to divide work up somewhat evenly and allow everyone to contribute.
• Create a Team Charter.
  • o The Team Charter is an accountability document. It lays out everything discussed in the above bullets and acts as a contract for the team. Everyone should see it and agree to it, so that you can refer back to it if conflicts arise.

What to Do in a Group Meeting

Regular meetings are a vital part of the collaborative process. Your instructor may give you time to work in class, but you should also find time outside of class to hold meetings. Meetings may be virtual, in person, and/or both. During meetings your group should exchange ideas, brainstorm, offer progress updates, and make sure that everyone is on track with their work. You can also use meetings to discuss conflicts and resolve problems. Here are some steps to a successful team meeting:

1. Initiate: Begin each meeting with an open forum. How is everyone progressing? Are there any problems or obstacles?
2. Seek information, opinions, status reports: Make sure that everyone has a chance to give their opinion or give an update.
3. Questions: Raise questions about what has been done and that further your understanding. The more information gathered, the better.
4. Clarify: Clarify any questions, answers, and information. Make sure everyone understands.
5. Summarize: Give a detailed but concise summary of the meeting, including next steps.
6. Archive: Take detailed notes and keep them where everyone can access them.

 How to Stay on Track

Pacing the project is fundamental to delivering a quality project and delivering it on time. While time management is important for individual work, it is perhaps even more so for group work. If you start to fall behind, the rest of your team falls behind. Here are some tips for keeping on track:

• Keep constant communication. Making team members aware of issues early can help alleviate them. Perhaps someone else has finished their part, and they’re willing to help you out. If you don’t let them know, though, they won’t have the opportunity to do so.
• Check in regularly. Regular check-ins and status reports can alert you to issues even if the person is unwilling to say that there is an issue.
• Use collaborative drafting technologies, such as Google Docs. This way, everyone can see what everyone else has done, adding a layer of accountability that will make team members less likely to fall behind.
• Use progress reports for each team member. This gives you an official team document that outlines everyone’s work process.

Tips to Resolve Conflict

If you have had a negative experience with a group project in the past, it is likely because there was some sort of conflict between team members. While the success of a collaborative project hinges on team members sharing their opinions, the differences of opinions may also cause conflict. To benefit from the various voices and strengths of team members, you must define ways to deal with these conflicts.

The most common conflicts that occur during collaboration are based on individual differences, such as:

• Interpersonal: differences in personality, work ethic, process, etc.
• Identity: differences between how team members perform their identity, informing attitudes toward situations and differences in communication styles
• Cultural: differences due to national or international cultural differences

In addition, you might have conflicts arise due to the actual work or amount of work being done by one another. Someone might feel like another group member is not pulling their weight, or conversely the group see a single member as being too controlling or as trying to do the whole project by themselves. In these instances, it’s important to do a couple of things: refer to the group contract to remind all members of their duties, remind the person(s) causing problems that everyone’s grade relies on the project, and reassert that each member should contribute equally to complete the project.

Managing and resolving conflict allows you to keep the open communication necessary for everyone to contribute to the project. When teams fail, it most often has to do with poor communication. Teams that communicate poorly fail to provide the regular updates needed to keep the team on schedule and fail to communicate obstacles that impede project workflow. When team members feel that they are not being heard or respected, they may develop resentment for the project and for other team members. Communication failures result in the group’s inability to produce work. A team that communicates effectively and resolves its differences will produce a stronger project.

Conflict resolution involves two stages. First, put practices in place to prevent conflict from arising. Second, establish protocols for resolving conflict if it does occur. Here are several tips for preventing conflict:

• Always allow time for everyone to speak and voice their opinion
• Listen carefully to what group members are saying
• Find a common ground

When conflicts over ideas arise, such as the direction of the project, here are some steps you can take:

• Choose a mediator (if no one on your team can be unbiased, ask your instructor to mediate)
• Let each team member tell their side without interruption
• Discuss the merits of each opinion
• Discuss potential problem with each opinion
• Resolve the issue democratically

When conflicts over deliverables arise, such as team members not turning in their work on time or they are turning in work that is insufficient, here are some steps that you can take:

• Discuss the issue as soon as it arises and make time for it at the next group meeting
• Focus on the issue and not the person responsible
• Illustrate how the issue impacts the project
• Discuss as a team how to get the project back on track
• Keep in mind that sometimes writing issues and procrastination arise from lack of confidence, and in a group setting can arise from lack of feeling valued by the team

Learning how to resolve conflicts effectively and developing strategies for doing so are essential for doing collaborative work in both classroom and workplace settings. If you do run into a conflict in your group, it may be stressful – but think of it as a relatively low-stakes learning opportunity to develop your own skills for the future.

Writing as a Team

One of the key components of group work in ENGL 115 is not just learning how to work as a team member, but how to write as a team. Very often, students will divide up the writing immediately and have one group member write each section of the report. This is a perfectly fine way to delegate responsibilities, but can cause major issues if not approached well.

The trick to group writing is that you want the final product to read as if one person wrote it. However, when groups divide writing among its members, it’s often very apparent that different people authored different sections of the final project. There will be differences in writing styles, inconsistencies in the information provided, differences in formatting, and more. As instructors, we have seen collaborative writing projects that contain inconsistent alignments, fonts, and formatting styles, and confusing cross-references and source citations. These may cause readers to question your ethos, your professionalism, and attention to detail.

Because team members do not share the same writing style, it may be difficult to check consistency during the drafting stages of writing. But there is something that you can do at the start of a project to help produce a more cohesive and consistent final draft. Make a style guide. A style guide sets out guidelines for how everyone should write their portions for

the project. A style guide might include things like:

• Verb tense
• Point of view (First-, second-, and/or third-person)
• Citation style
• Heading format and hierarchy
• Alignment
• Figure formatting (captions, placement, text wrapping, etc)
• Spacing
• Indentation
• Bullet style
• Font
• Active or passive voice preference

Establishing a style guide in the beginning should help to prevent some inconsistencies from occurring. But there will still be noticeable differences once the portions are joined. Thus, many of the important aspects of group writing come at the end of the project. Revision and editing are crucial for group writing projects. Every team member should read the portions written by the others. By doing this, the group may offer opinions about the overall cohesiveness and consistency of the project. It is a good practice to separate revision and editing into two distinct tasks and to assign each to two different people. This practice allows one person to focus on big-picture issues and the other to concentrate on smaller details of the document.

Here are some things to look out for as you merge styles and do your final edits to create a cohesive document:

• Check for consistency in: point of view, tense, statistics, prices, figures, sources, ideas, reasoning, format, font
• Look out for repetition
• Keep an even tone
• Ensure logical flow of ideas
• Smooth over stylistic differences such as sentence and paragraph length, vocabulary level, voice, transitions, etc.

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