I have had some good group experiences and some bad ones. The good experiences differ from the bad in two ways: group members know what they're doing, and care about doing it. The former relates to both general knowledge (as you put it, knowing the right way to do things) and specific knowledge of one's assignment, while the latter is basically motivation.
Of course, it's easy to reflect on my past experiences and see, in retrospect, what shaped my feelings about them. However, that's not quite at the point where it's useful for predicting when future experiences will be good ones. Working in a group, especially with people you don't know well, can lead to a lot of anxiety due to your uncertainty about the other people and how they will perform. Here's how I've resolved this problem: figure out when I can trust the other people to know what they're doing and care about doing it. If my priors for the group members indicate that I should trust them, I simply do, unless new events warrant a reevaluation of that trust. If they indicate that I shouldn't, I assume that I will have to do all the work myself, and get going based on that. These can be mixed and matched, if I have different priors for different people. Coming to a working conclusion about the other people and then acting on it eliminates much of the anxiety from uncertainty.
One example of a great group experience was this past summer, when I did research at Fermilab. Because of the prominence of the laboratory, my priors for trusting my group members' competence were high, and every day that trust was validated. Everyone had skilled backgrounds, knew the right ways to do things, and cared about the research.
In contrast, many such "group projects" in school were bad experiences. Year after year of these led me to develop the policy that if a person seemed unlikely to be invested and competent, I* would cut them out of the action or give them busywork whose importance was minimal (in those highly irritating cases where the teacher demanded that each person contribute or the grade would be lowered anyway). School group projects are generally important for the grade rather than their actual content, and therefore, I reasoned, getting the grade is also more important than achieving the "intended" semi-egalitarian group experience.
I suspect this is what led to the "new sort of problem" you described. It seems likely that when you missed the meeting and didn't actively respond to the email communication, alarm bells went off for one or more of the other people in the group, especially if they didn't know you well beforehand. I admit without embarrassment that I have done to other people the same thing that happened to you. Obviously you know you're competent and invested, but that doesn't mean others do. It's unfortunate that you lost a group learning experience. However, for a project in which the outcome (the actual result and/or the grade) is most important, best practices dictate not taking chances on other members whose competence and investment seem uncertain.
To sum up: decide when and who you can trust, and go from there. Realize that the outcome is what's important, and it's not your responsibility to coax and prod every group member into a state of motivation and competence if they're not already there; in the same way, it's not others' responsibility to do that for you.
*I recognize that you stated you're not skilled at leading groups. To modify this advice for you (and other such people), I suggest that, if you come to that sort of realization about the person in the group and you're not the appointed or apparent leader, bring it up to the person who is, in such a way that ey'll hopefully take care of the problem.
Edit: I should have refreshed the page before submitting, as I now realize I repeated much of what other people posted before I finished writing mine. Oh well.
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I've hated group projects since about Grade 3. I grew up assuming that at some point, working in groups would stop being a series of trials and tribulations, and turn into normal, sane people working just like they would normally, except on a shared problem. Either they would change, or I would change, because I am incredibly bad at teamwork, at least the kind of it that gets doled out in the classroom. I don’t have the requisite people skills to lead a group, but I’m too much of a control freak to meekly follow along when the group wants to do a B+ project and I would like an A+. Drama inevitably ensues.
I would like to not have this problem. An inability to work in teams seems like a serious handicap. There are very few jobs that don’t involve teamwork, and my choice of future career, nursing, involves a lot.
My first experiences in the workplace, as a lifeguard, made me feel a little better about this. There was a lot less drama and a lot more just getting the work done. I think it has a lot to do with a) the fact that we’re paid to do a job that’s generally pretty easy, and b) the requirements of that job are pretty simple, if not easy. There is drama, but it rarely involves guard rotations or who’s going to hose the deck, and I can safely ignore it. Rescues do involve teamwork, but it’s a specific sort of teamwork where the roles are all laid out in advance, and that’s what we spent most of our training learning. Example: in a three-guard scenario, the guard to notice an unconscious swimmer in the water becomes guard #1: they make a whistle signal to the others and jump in, while guard #2 calls 911 and guard #3 clears the pool and does crowd control. There isn’t a lot of room for drama, and there isn’t much point because there is one right way to do things, everyone knows the right way to do things, and there isn’t time to fight about it anyway.
I’m hoping that working as a nurse in a hospital will be more this and less like the school-project variety of group work. The roles are defined and laid out; they’re what we’re learning right now in our theory classes. There’s less of a time crunch, but there’s still, usually, an obviously right way to do things. Maybe it gets more complicated when you have to approach a colleague for, say, not following the hand-hygiene rules, or when the rules the hospital management enforces are obviously not the best way to do things, but those are add-ons to the job, not its backbone.
But that’s for bedside nursing. Research is a different matter, and unfortunately, it’s a lot more like school. I’m taking a class about research right now, and something like 30% or 40% of our mark is on a group project. We have to design a study from beginning to end: problem, hypothesis, type of research, research proposal, population and sample, methods of measurement, methods of analysis, etc. My excuse that “I dislike this because it has absolutely no real-world relevance” is downright wrong, because we’re doing exactly what real researchers would do, only with much less resources and time, and I do like research and would like to work in that milieu someday.
Conflict with my group-members usually comes because I’m more invested in the outcome than the others. I have more motivation to spend time on it, and a higher standard for "good enough". Even if I think the assignment is stupid, I want to do it properly, partly for grades and partly because I hate not doing things properly. I don’t want to lead the group, because I know I’m terrible at it, but no one else wants to either because they don’t care either way. I end up feeling like a slave driver who isn’t very good at her job.
This time I had a new sort of problem. A group asked me to join them because they thought I was smart and would be a good worker. They set a personal deadline to have the project finished nearly a month before it was due. They had a group meeting, which I couldn’t go to because I was at work, and assigned sections, and sent out an email with an outline. I skimmed the email and put it aside for later, since it seemed less than urgent to me. ...And all of a sudden, at our next meeting, the project was nearly finished. No one had hounded me; they had just gone ahead and done it. Maybe they had a schema in their heads that hounding the non-productive members of the team would lead to drama, but I was offended, because I felt that in my case it wouldn’t have. I would have overridden my policy of doing my work at the last minute, and just gotten it done. It’s not like I didn’t care about our final grade.
My pride was hurt (the way my classmate told me was by looking at my computer screen in the library, where I’d started to do the part assigned to me in the outline, and saying “you might as well not save that, I already did it.”) I didn’t feel like fighting about it, so I emailed the prof and asked if I could do the project on my own instead of with a team. She seemed confused that I wanted to do extra work, but assented.
I didn’t want to do extra work. I wanted to avoid the work of team meetings, team discussions, team drama... But that’s not how real-world research works. Refusing to play their game means I lose an opportunity to improve my teamwork skills, and I’m going to need those someday, and not just the skills acquired through lifeguarding. Either I need to turn off my control-freak need to have things my way, or I need to become charismatic and good at leading groups, and to do either of those things, I need a venue to practice.
Does anyone else here have the same problem I do? Has anyone solved it? Does anyone have tips for ways to improve?
Edit: reply to comment by jwendy, concerning my 'other' kind of problem.
"I probably didn't say enough about it in the article, if you thought it seemed glossed over, but I thought a lot about why this happened at the time, and I was pretty upset (more than I should have been, really, over a school project) and that's why I left the group...because unlike type#2 team members, I actually cared a lotabout making a fair contribution and felt like shit when I hadn't. I never consciously decided to procrastinate, either...I just had a lot of other things on my plate, which is pretty much inevitable during the school year, and all of a sudden, foom!, my part of the project is done because one of the girls was bored on the weekend and had nothing better to do. (Huh? When does this ever happen?)
So I guess I'm like a team #2 member in that I procrastinate when I can get away with it, but like a team#1 member in that I do want to turn in quality work and get an A+. And I want it to my my quality work, not someone else's with my name on it."
I think it was justified to be surprised when the new kind of problem happened to me. If I'm more involved/engaged than all the students I've worked with in the past, that doesn't mean I'm the most engaged, but it does mean I have a schema in my brain for 'no one has their work finished until a week after they say they will'.