As you could read in these two articles: one and two we had some trouble in our group. During this coaching I did not feel like I could accept the current situation any longer and also after talking with Lisette who assured me that it would be discussed during this group coaching I decided I would put everything on the table myself (as no one else did during the conversation).
At first I said that I thought that the group needed to be pushed more. Normally I try to push a group I am in (as in trying to keep everyone working and motivated) but I did not do this yet this time, because I do not always want to be “the one in charge”. However I felt that the group needed this. I proposed it and they did not want it, because it felt too harsh for them. However Ebru did say that she would help Frederique personally more to keep working during the day.
The next things I asked about where the things from the articles I mentioned in the first paragraph. I asked Frederique what was wrong and she said that she did not know anymore and then Ebru asked what she meant with “bad open communication”. She told us that sometimes she does not want to say things back for example when I say I do not think something is possible she does not want to say that she thinks otherwise. I said that she should still say that and that I would be happy to be proven wrong. I also said that she told me she wanted to make a feature in a short time, but then she said “no, I only wanted to do research”. To this I asked her whether she could be more clear in her communication because then I wouldn’t have said that it wasn’t possible. Another thing was that she did not explain it well on Trello and gave the card a lot of hours, which was also why I said it wasn’t possible with all the work she still had to do as well.
The last thing we talked about is that Frederique spends a lot of hours (for example the entire afternoon) on her personal projects instead of school work. To this she said that she tries to work more hours after school to even it out. But Ebru then corrected her because in the example where she lost the whole afternoon she only worked an hour extra and that is not enough. We then made an agreement that she should not work on other things in school hours anymore and I hope that this will work out well.
Reflection
What I learned from this coaching is that I need to put things on the table if they are troubling me and that you need to set boundaries (like the thing I wrote in the last paragraph) to help some people work well. Also sometimes people communicate in a different way and you may not get the information you need which leads to miscommunication.
I hope that from now on our group will work better together.