Sometimes when you work with people there can be clashes. Either through conflicts of interest or one person wanting to take complete control over what happens or maybe there are people who don’t want to do any work at all. Often these issues are very minor and can be solved quickly. Here are a few tips on how to either avoid or solve these issues.

1. Make sure everyone is on the same page. This will help a lot in groups as everyone will have great ideas but not all of them will be used and agreeing on one strong idea that perhaps incorporates everyone’s idea in some way will stop arguments.
2. Designate work equally. Often in group projects the main issue is that some people are left with all the work whilst others do nothing. This can cause bad blood within the group dynamic and isn’t healthy for a good work ethic. Therefore, make sure that everyone in the group has a chunk of work that they can get into doing and then come together once a week or so to check up on how everyone is doing on their piece of work. We did this for our magazine project and found it to work really well as everyone had manageable amounts of work to get on with and everyone felt as if they were contributing.
3. Have a designated leader. This really helps for when a group decision can’t be agreed on. Having a group leader can decide on important details of work that needs to be done. We found that having a leader was really useful as our group leader had previous knowledge and experience of running a magazine press so she was very helpful in bringing us up to speed with what jobs we would need to do to have the magazine be successful and designating us roles that would be best suited to us.
4. Be professional. There is no point working in a group if you’re not willing to be professional. You’ll have to be willing to leave your feelings out of discussions as not everyone will agree with you but that doesn’t mean they don’t like you – these things are completely separate but easy to get mixed up. You also need to be prepared to have difficult conversations if things go wrong, for example, if someone isn’t pulling their weight then they need to be told that they have to do their job as it isn’t fair on the rest of the group.

Hopefully these tips help if you’re doing a group project and come across any hurdles or setbacks within the group dynamic.