Key Event 1

What?

During my sophomore and junior year, I served as the Resident Adviser Liaison to the Hall Council for Peddrew-Yates, Payne and New Residence Hall East.  The Hall Council members are part of the General Assembly of the Residence Hall Federation.  My main job was to mentor and advise the students on the council.  My job was to facilitate the leadership of the members, not to lead the council.  At the end of one of the semesters, the hall council decided to throw a big outdoors event to use up the last of their money before the semester concluded.

So What?

As I observed the group working through the process I noticed how diversity affects the process.  There were several people who had an area of expertise.  Having people that are good with money, planning out a time frame, thinking of the placement of everything for the day of the event, advertising, and other such things improved the performance of everyone because for the most part no member had to do something they were unfamiliar with doing.  During the time they spent brainstorming for ideas for the new project it was very exciting to see the many different ideas that were thrown around and seriously discussed.  If every member of the council didn't have their own good idea for how the rest of the money should be spent I doubt we would have arrived at the great decision of having an outdoor carnival type event for the community.  Then  it came time to split up the budget on what needed to be spent for the event.  This is when I saw the bad side of diversity.  The group members each had their own ideas for what would make for a fun carnival event.  This led to a night of strong willed disagreements over how the money should be split up for the event.  Eventually, the other Adviser and myself had to step in and calm them down.

Now What?

I have seen the good and the bad side of diversity.  Before this key event, I never thought that diversity of any kind would matter to have on a team.  However, that made me realize that a group with great diversity has more functional attributes that end up becoming very beneficial no matter what is trying to be accomplished.  On the other hand, diversity of personal attributes is pretty much only beneficial, in my opinion, for the brainstorming of ideas.  Once you have an idea and it is time to stop thinking outside the box and start finalizing the details, it is better to have cohesion than it is to have diversity on the team.  From then on, when formed a team I looked towards diversity in functional attributes.  While I was still in the “thinking outside the box” mode, or was in need of new ideas, I looked outside of the group for personality diversity in order to be more creative.