Post #4: Reflection on meeting 1

We had planned to conduct our first meeting on Wednesday at 11 am in an unused classroom at AS6. The meeting started late as we had initially assumed that the room 206 would be empty. We had to hunt around for another unused classroom. So, there was poor planning on our part. We should have checked the availability of the room in advance.
This was my first time chairing a meeting. The other members in my team are Joon Wai and Kai Ren. They were pretty supportive even though I made several mistakes during the meeting.

My first mistake was poor time management. I got carried away by  the discussion and did not keep track of the time at all! As a result, the meeting had to end rather abruptly at noon as I had to attend a tutorial. During the meeting, I was sitting with my back to the clock. What I could have done was to orientate myself such that I’m facing the clock during the next meeting. Facing the clock would constantly remind me to keep track of the time.

Another mistake that I made was that I didn’t really give the others many chances to speak. The fact that I had already pretty much worked out the project in my head, combined with the pressure of looking good on camera, has probably caused me to “bulldoze” my way through objections. I will keep this in mind and will try to avoid this during our next meeting.

All in all, the meeting wasn’t that big of a fiasco as it looked. While it didn’t go perfectly, we still managed to assign tasks, and decide on what to do. Furthermore, we managed to get to know each other a lot better. We had only worked with each other once in class before starting on this project.

Once again, thank you Joon Wai and Kai Ren for your support during the meeting.

Post #3: Resolving interpersonal conflict

John has worked really hard and has just graduated from NUS with a first class honours degree in computer engineering. He was lucky enough to join a large and reputable company, ABC Company and receives a good salary for his work.

After a few weeks of work, John felt that his manager, Mr Tan always assigns menial tasks such as sweeping the floor or photocopying documents to his division and not to others. He felt that these kinds of jobs are tedious and beneath him. While his colleagues were also unhappy with the situation, none of them showed any interest in expressing their dissatisfaction to Mr Tan.

John decided to stand up for the group. So, he went up to Mr Tan and explained that everyone in the division felt that they were always unfairly given the most tedious chores. However, Mr Tan rudely said, “Get back to work”.

Enraged, John decided to complain directly to the human resource (HR) department. John subsequently won the case against Mr Tan, and Mr Tan was called down for it. John’s division was then no longer given such menial tasks and John was regarded as a sort of “hero” amongst his colleagues. However, John soon noticed that everything that required Mr Tan’s authorization, such as his leave application either took a long time to be approved or was ignored altogether.

John decided to complain to the HR department again. However, when the HR department tried to confirm his story with his colleagues, none of them backed him up.

After enduring the poor work environment for a few months, John eventually decided to leave the company.


There are many factors affecting this workplace conflict scenario and we can consider some of the following questions:

How could John have done better in this conflict?
Should he have simply endured those tedious tasks?
Was workplace politics the only factor that caused his downfall?
Should he have known something was wrong when his colleagues didn’t dare confront Mr Tan?