Reflection Upon Role Play Experience for Communication

Reflecting upon role play activity experience is an essential ability for all experts to grow better administration and communication skills, disagreement decision and improve future execution. To think back on the play that was directed as group work a week ago has permitted taking an interest understudies to pick up administration and negotiation skill. This paper will reflect upon the part that I personally played in this pretend action, and in addition fundamentally investigate our execution as a group work. It could be contended that our group performed well in general; yet more negotiation, communication and management abilities could have been moved forward. This paper will remark upon the group work, business communication style, procedures and propose likely upgrades in future exercises.

Our team comprised five members and were all delegated with a particular role within the simulation. Reflecting upon my role as ‘key negotiator’, I felt at the time that this did not entirely suit my personality profile. Largo and Johns (2008) state than ensuring close matches between simulation and real-life personality traits are more likely to produce positive results. For me, perhaps the most challenging part of being assigned this role was working and communicating effectively with our team in a clear and assertive way. Occasionally, I felt uneasy negotiating with other team members who I felt had their ‘own agenda’ and seemed unwilling at times to compromise. In hindsight, this was one of the biggest challenges I faced in this activity. However, it also allowed me to build my skills and confidence in these areas over the number of weeks we were involved in the simulation.

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The role that effective communication played within the simulation was of key importance and the chance to personally critically reflect upon this is also as important. Nixon (2014), Johnson and Wiggs (2011) and Peterson (2012) all state that effective communication within a team dynamic is essential. This is further supported by research (Wu & Xiao 2011; Peterson 2012) that claims that team members need to employ open dialogue and have clear agendas. To comment upon my communicative style, it appeared that I tried to not compromise myself but be as Danks (2012, p. 24) states ‘a clear and reasoned thinker and communicator’. For the most part, our group exchanged information well and it could be argued that we mostly achieved goals through effective dialogue, clear understanding and working as a cohesive team. In summary then, it can be acknowledged that our team communicated effectively throughout this simulation and upon reflection, this clearly aided us in reaching our overall goals.

Another benefit to reflection is the opportunity to rectify issues that can impede performance. ‘To improve the self, shows courage, persistence and effective determination’ (DuPont 2013, p. 69). To therefore reflect upon some of the challenges that the simulation brought to our team, and how we could resolve them, it could be said that effective delegation and time management seemed to hamper us. At the time, our team noticed that it was often hard to delegate tasks to team members. This was often due to conflicting schedules, workloads and other commitments. For me, this was a significant handicap in our team and perhaps ‘upon reflection’ we should have thought about how to delegate tasks in a more effective and clearer manner. Ellis (2012) argues that delegation can offer significant time savings when accomplishing group tasks, and this is something we should have considered more as we often did not take into account the particular strengths or weaknesses of the individuals in our team. In addition, it did appear that we experienced some challenges in our time management principles. In looking back, we had disputes with individuals arriving to scheduled meetings on time, undertaking simulation activities in a timely manner, as well as our team not allocating sufficient periods to successfully complete tasks. These were all significant challenges both to me personally, as well as to the remainder of the team. To reflect on this, perhaps demonstrates the need for ‘commitment from each team contributor to be a key agent of change’ (Atkins & Lowe 2011, p. 19). Having experienced these issues and to critically reflect upon them, it could be argued that our team should have been more realistic about the timing of activities, clearly determining who was responsible and effectively ensure that we could achieve the simulation goals in adequate time. This understanding has been a valuable lesson to me, and in the future, I will ensure that sufficient planning and ample time are adequately factored into group activities.

In conclusion, to reflect upon the role I have undertaken during the group simulation project, it can be maintained that a great deal has been learnt, experienced and confronted. In commenting upon the team dynamics, as well as the academic literature that has supported the learning this semester, it can be argued that a new set of knowledge and understanding has been created. In addition, it has been particularly important to become a reflective practitioner and that in undertaking such observations helps to improve not only one’s performance but also enhance discipline-specific knowledge.