Communication_and_Collaboration

Communication and Strategy Paper Different personality types and learning styles are the key components in communicating and collaborating in a team environment. Understanding the different learning styles and personalities is critical to communicating and collaborating effectively with individuals. While identifying the different personalities and learning styles of each individual, great care must be taken in understanding each aspect of individuals learning style and personality to effectively communicate within the team. We will be examining the organizer, adventurer and giver personality types as well as three different learning styles verbal linguistic, interpersonal and intrapersonal to come up with some strategies to communicate and collaborate effectively in a team environment. Organizers, adventurers and givers can work effectively in their group by using their dominate strengths. Organizers are responsible, reliable and take great care in paying attention to detail. Adventurers are hands on when problem solving, are flexible and great negotiators. Givers are great with diplomacy and have openness about them when dealing with others and are always willing to help others. When properly identified these characteristics are extremely valuable to the success of team collaboration and communication. The organizers being the responsible and reliable ones can ensure the team is staying on point with tasks. Adventurers are responsible for negotiating and delegating tasks to be done on the team and the giver can work on helping team members and keeping the peace among the team. The next thing that needs to be addressed in a learning team is identifying each team members learning style and how to effectively communicate with each individual. Howard Gardner, a Harvard professor, states that there are eight intelligences that are possessed by all people, and that every person has developed some intelligences more fully than others. We will be going over three of those intelligences and coming up with strategies to communicate effectively in a team environment. Verbal Linguistic: The individual with this dominant learning style is someone that enjoys telling stories, enjoys topics that interest them and are generally good negotiators. Some ways to effectively communicate with the Verbal Linguistic would be to let them present any presentations required for a group assignment and then let them do the Q&A at the end of the presentation. Interpersonal: The individual with this dominant learning style enjoys projects that involve people, enjoy helping others and are good at understanding people and making them feel comfy. Ways to communicate with them would be to have these individuals explain what the functions of the team would be and to help any individual that needs extra clarification. The interpersonal communicator would essentially be the mediator of the group and the individual that will most likely be the one that other members of the team come to if they need help or have questions. Intrapersonal: This individual prefers to work on projects alone, needs quiet time to think and needs to think about issues before they speak. Ways of communicating with this individual would be to give the individual a task to perform that in the end will be a part of the groups completed project. Ask them questions in a manner that does not require an immediate response so that they can have quiet time to think and let them think about the question before they speak. In conclusion if every member of a team had the same personality or used the same learning style, the team would fail to be successful in a competitive work environment due to the fact that there would be no ingenuity. Diversity in a group is critical to the success because it focuses on all the many different strengths and omits possible weaknesses that would be prevalent in a group where everyone was the same. With such diversity in a team there is bound to be conflict, but by identifying all learning styles and personalities on a team each individual will be able to understand other team members points of view and will in turn allow for communication and collaboration to flow more freely in the group.