Photo by Heather Giselle Scott

If there is one thing I have seen more than a few times in my career, it is what working groups look like when they are falling apart, splintering into bickering, defensive, and ultimately dysfunctional behaviors.

The Value of Reasoned Discourse

Fortunately, my early training as a teacher took place in a healthy setting elegantly run by my first boss, Elizabeth Soppelsa, who knew how to empower her employees while still making it clear who was really in charge. If you wanted to question a policy at the Applied English Center, in Lippincott Hall, at the University of Kansas, all you had to do was to say so, directly to her, and be sure you had a solid rationale to present for your new idea. I have known only a handful of professionals who could organize a conversation about potential changes as an exercise in civil discourse, where only reason and logic counted and no one felt any emotional attachment to routines or traditions. Every semester, a curriculum committee would start to sort through the dozens of new textbooks on the market, and initiate the discussions that led to consensus on the many innovations that came with each new enrollment. It takes a well-stocked coffee maker and an open approach to conversation to maintain the level of rational interaction that persisted in Betty Soppelsa's shop. It also takes optimism and faith in the good will of your fellow workers.

Rescuing a Project with Honesty

Five or six years earlier, when I was a senior in high school, I experienced a rocky dynamic on a group of 13 of us who were working together on our school yearbook, luckily under the supervision of John Mohn, the journalism teacher at Great Bend High School, in that era. One dispute that almost paralyzed our yearbook staff was over whether to place the Chevrolet bicentennial eagle right side up or sideways on the cover of our book. It was a wonderful coup to get permission from the company to use their advertising logo, but we were nearly at each other's throats as we argued over which orientation to use, "portrait" or "landscape," in today's terminology. The matter was resolved pretty quickly once our photographers went into the dark room and processed two prints for us to compare. As it turned out, the portrait orientation looked just fine, and that was what we decided on. But our advisor, Mr. Mohn, gave me some advice behind the scenes, and I knew that the healing on our staff would only start with a clear statement by me that "I was wrong and you were right," to disarm the offended faction and rekindle our team spirit.

Open-Mindedness and Flexibility for a Viable Program

I have some experience working in international settings, and have found that cross-cultural dimensions can complicate group dynamics even further. Again, I was fortunate to have a sage mentor at a certain point in my career who raised my awareness regarding cultural understanding and sensitivity in working together across many different aspects of cultural values and beliefs--differences that can arise even between professionals who seem to share similar backgrounds and experiences. Dave Hopkins, my colleague at UNRIDJ-Tokyo and then my boss at OPELT-Chubu, was and still is a master at project development and group leadership. Like my earlier mentors, he encouraged team members to continually define and refine their job descriptions, and inspired us to realize ourselves through our work. Our team meetings at OPELT were truly open conversations, and Dave was fully capable of flexibly accommodating to a new suggestion if it really made good sense. He was never tied to his own ideas and was open to learning and growing himself, to an extent I am not sure I have ever seen before those years at OPELT or afterwards. The OPELT program that Dave Hopkins built at Chubu University lasted more than 15 years, a significant accomplishment when one considers the fact that dozens of branch campus and other American-Japanese educational partnerships failed in that "bubble" from the late 1980s to the late 1990s.

Teachers Who Remain Accessible

I have had the good fortune to be given an opportunity to rekindle and maintain friendships with my former teachers and mentors. I have written in these pages about such experiences with my fifth grade wrestling coach, Steve Wolf, and my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Esfeld.

But I have not pestered any of these key influences in my life more than I have John Mohn, or "Mr. Mohn," as I know him. He has moved three or four times in the past 30 years or so, and I always manage to locate him, and am usually invited to visit. Now we communicate by e-mail sometimes, and I contacted him a few weeks ago, requesting a favor.

In the aftermath of that yearbook staff feud from high school, Mr. Mohn had prepared at that time a two-page document to make sure we learned something from the experience. He called that document "How to Destroy a Group," and included a list of "Characteristics of Successful Groups" as well as "Characteristics of Unsuccessful Groups."

I e-mailed Mr. Mohn, here these 38 years later, to ask if he might still have a copy of that document....A few days later, he sent me scans of those same typed pages, which he had been able to locate in his file cabinets down in his basement.

"How to Destroy a Group," by John Mohn

Here are the items from the list of unsuccessful traits: