Decisions, decisions.

During the management class in my college the professor gave us a chance to improve our midterm grades by completing a simple task: we all had to make a decision on how we were going to fix the grade. The only condition was given: every single person in our class should vote for the decision. After a long process of the decision making, we  made up a solution – the professor would give us an extra credit assignment, plus the grade after the extra assignment would be curved. Although decision was made and everybody voted for it, we had a hard time making it.

As we know there are several behavior models during the decision making process:

“Compete to win” behavior. There were several students in our class (I would say one or two) who very actively and , may I say, aggressively promoted their ideas.

Avoidance behavior. Some students, including me, didn’t participate in the decision making at all.

Compromise behavior.  Most of the students worked as mediators, trying to get at least any result (if we wouldn’t have agreed, the professor wouldn’t give us any extra points for the test at all).

Accommodation behavior. Probably some students who get the highest grades in the exam didn’t really care about the decision, so they didn’t actively participate.

Collaboration behavior. Those were real negotiators who provided us with their ideas and respectfully listen ideas of the other students. I think it was the second larger group of people in the class after the compromise behavior.

As I mentioned above, personally I chose the avoidance behavior. Well firstly because I was really not in the mood of talking and negotiating. Secondly, I feel really uncomfortable negotiating the ideas in the large groups (30-40 people are too much for me). I am sure I would have feelt morally better had we discussed this in the small groups (3-5 people). I would have probably used collaboration behavior , or maybe even “compete to win” one. Also, as the theory says, on the subconscious level I felt that it would be hard to proceed with the idea that everyone liked. Personally, I would have voted for the standard multiple choice question, I am actually shocked that the class decided to keep the test almost the same way it was before! But, oh well, can’t change anything now.

I want another egg :(

In my management class we were assigned to create a case for an egg to protect it from breaking if someone would drop the egg from 5 -5 feet height. The material consisted from 8 straws and the 2 feet duck-tape in. We had 25 minuted to plan it in the groups, and only 10 minuts to build the case. It was a planning exercise. As you know there are 5 steps in planning:

1. Setting the goals.

2. Determining objectives.

3. Developing strategies.

4. Making a tactical plan.

5. The plan implementation and evaluating the results.

We knew the goal, and the objective was to build a case for an egg which will save it from breaking when the egg hits the floor. The first mistake we made, in my opinion, was didn’t choosing a manager (leader) of the group. You see, it is quite awkward to do it on your own. Some people may want is, some people don’t, other people want to bea manager but too shy to step forward, and so on. I think in this types of exercise the professor should assign a leader for each group. Everyone should try to be a leader in the group, which means a new leader (manager) should be selected every time when a group exercise is conducted.

During the developing the strategies stage we agreed right away that we were going to use the first design proposal. No alternatives were made. Maybe, if we thought more, we would created more efficient designs. That was another mistake.

Third mistake was is that we didn’t determine who in the group is responsible for which action during the construction process, which was set for only 10 minutes. Becauseof this mistake, we didn’t create the design we planned on the blueprint, so we had to improvise.  When the construction process began it was a little bit confusing who is doing what. The leader of the group should have assigned a different position in the construction process before the construction started to each member, so we would complete the planned design on time.

In conclusion, I believe that a leader in the group would have helped to perform better. Also, members of a group should always think of an alternative strategies and tactics to implement these strategies, and not to stick with a first idea. Also, before actually beginning of the work, the specific positions in the group should be assigned to each member. By the way, our egg did break. :)