The Antidote to Poisonous People: intro

This year has already posed it's challenges early into the term. Although, the situations may be difficult and frustrating at times, I'm slowly learning to conquer them one by one.

Greg Wilson at the University of Toronto teaches a project course, CSC301, in which the class is divided into groups to develop a piece of software. One of the main challenges of which is having to deal with group members, which for the most part, one has never met before. According to the research quoted by Greg Wilson, there is an increase in productivity when working with strangers then with friends.

Regardless of who your group members are, productivity does not from familiarity of the people alone. It also has to do with how group members communicate. Greg posted an interesting link to an article title "Poisonous People", which lists a several profiles of group members that are deemed to be destructive to a group. However, in reading it, I realized that there was no solution to these poisonous people.

Applying what I have learned by taking on leadership roles in the past, I am proposing to suggest a possible antidote and diagnostics to the behaviors of the problematic group members.

The idea is not to get rid of poisonous people, but to neutralize the threat that they cause to the group. As a group, every member has the ability to make significant contributions to a great end result. Stephen Covey states, "Strength lies in differences, not in similarities." Through differences, group members can acquire great experience on learning how to approach a solution for those differences. However, similarities are important as well. It is important for a group to keep at least one common goal in mind. This gives a group a sense of direction, a 'striving' factor.

Over the course of the next several blogs, I will post one poisonous model and discuss on the antidote.