Team Development: A Reflection on Adjourning

The adjourning stage of team development, in my experience, has been one of two things: easy or difficult.  I had the most difficult time concluding my time at a Wilderness Campus I attended my first year of undergrad.  There were only 25 students admitted each year to this program.  We all attended the same class each week (each class ran 3 weeks as an intensive), cooked for one another, cleaned together, ate together, and did many outdoor leadership trips together.  We were a high-performing group with well-established norms and were all committed to growing and learning together despite our differences.  For some of our wilderness survival trips our lives even depended on one another.  this group was the most difficult group to leave that I have ever experienced.  It was the type of group that you can go for a few years without being in contact with any one of them and then meet up for coffee when traveling in a similar location and pick up like it was just yesterday that we saw one another.  To conclude our time together we planned a graduation type ceremony inviting parents, friends, and locals that we befriended during our time in the Northwoods of Wisconsin.  We sang together, reminisced, made a slideshow, performed some awesome and also weird talents, and our director gave a very nice talk including each one of us by name.  It was the perfect way to conclude our time together.

I think that when we conclude our time at Walden it will not be such a tough transition.  Building a team face-to-face is much different than how we have built our "team" in the virtual world.  It has been a great experience and I am thankful for familiar faces and conversation from one course to the next. 

Either way, in both situations the step of adjourning is very important.  Closure is am important thing in all aspects of life.