The Journey Begins

Assessments can be deemed very difficult; managing your time correctly so you’re not ‘cramming’ on deadline day is one of the main issues. However when working within groups this task becomes increasing difficult as you are longer responsible for not just your grade but also for the rest of the groups grades too. So when putting your grade into someone else’s hand you tend to ask yourself, will we all get along? Will we work well together? Can I rely on them to pull their weight? When working in Public Relations (PR) it is vital to be able work well with others as you will be required to work with clients as well as the rest of your team whether it’s in house or in agency. PR as defined by CIPR (Charted Institute of Public Relations) “It is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics. This can be applied when working with colleagues in PR you must maintain goodwill and have a mutual understanding to work well together.  

Well one way of figuring out whether a team will work or not is to do a personality test such as the Belbin Test. The Belbin test was created by Meredith Belbin to establish your role within a team. “Meredith Belbin initially identified a set ofeight roles, which, it is argued, are all present in a team provide goodbalance and increase likelihood of success.”

So our results showed that Rhiannon was a Completer Finisher, Kayleigh was a Plant and Amy and I were Coordinators as well as all being team workers. According to Belbin there should a balance of personalities in order to make a group work. So all being team workers could be a problem, this is a theory that we will put to the test. However we still chose to work together as we have all previously worked together on many occasions so decided to work together again.

The first task when meeting up with your group is finding a time that suits all, with other deadlines looming and everyone being busy you must be flexible with your time. From my past experience when people can’t meet it when problems arise as you need to be able to work around others or the work just won’t get done. For us this was not a problem as we all realise what we need to do and that we must work around each other we fit our schedules together to find out when will work best.

After we had been given our brief we then arranged a time for us all to meet, so now it’s time to get the ball rolling...