Team versus individual.
It is all about the team these days. In class, more often than not our professors ask us to work with each other in a team to brainstorm ideas or carry out projects. Outside of class when we are on the field playing soccer or some other kind of sports the coach shouts team spirit loud enough to make us deaf.
The team-based approach can be applied to almost everything. Yes, there is still the emphasis on individualism with the society encouraging people to form their own opinions and ideas on things and standing up for what they believe in instead of going with the norm. However, now, the team theme is everywhere bringing together people that at first do not know each other and might not have interacted in the first place to creating a strong sense of loyalty and camaraderie simply because they have the same belief for a certain thing.
For one, the Harry Potter franchise with its four House system that groups people by their characteristics has many people identifying with each House, leading to the birth of communities of these people. During the time the Twilight franchise was popular, people identified themselves as Team Edward or Team Jacob to show support for their favourite man for the female protagonist to end up with.
Personally, I am all for working in team. I like to work together with different people because I feel that a team-based approach can actually result in better performance as well as higher productivity. However, for a team to function effectively, there has to be good communication.
Communication between different members in a team is one of the most important factors in determining if they can work together effectively towards a mutual goal. This is because not only does everyone have their own skills and knowledge that are new things that they can bring to the table to share with others, they also have different perspective on things. This means that on the same thing, team members might see things differently, and where there are differences there are always the likelihood of people not seeing eye to eye and thus leading to arguments.
I remember the first time that I felt how important it was to have good communication in a team. I had to work with a couple of people in one of my courses to come up with a proposal for a project that we would then be carrying out in the same team for the course. It was during the start of the semester in our first year so none of us actually knew each other very well. We were a team of four, and our first discussion where we had initially agreed we would decide on a topic that we could refine at a later session turned out to be a disaster.
A team member suggested that we could work around the topic of the health care delivery, and the rest of us agreed. That was a shining moment of consensus that lasted for about five seconds before differing opinions on how best to go forward were exchanged, tempers flared, and a series of fierce arguments began.
The root of the problem was that we did not take the time to communicate with each other on why we suggested what we did, and went straight into arguing for our points of view and pointing out the weaknesses of what others suggested. The whole debacle quickly escalated into us attacking each other with words that should probably not be repeated on paper. Or at all.
However, later after all of us had stopped talking to each other for a couple of hours, our anger subsided and we were able to mull over what had happened and decided that we were too rash rushing into things without the most important first step in any team project, which is deciding on how we would work together as a team. We had a talk about how we should interact more to get to know each other better, what were the information that we had, what were the skill sets we could each contribute to the project, how we could get the best out of each of our strengths and how to minimise each other’s weaknesses. We also decided on having a dynamic team leader role, identifying the expertise and specialty of each team member and agreeing on who to lead at different stages of the project.
We realised that it was important for us to first and foremost come to the agreement that we had to control ourselves before getting into an argument when we come across something that we might not see eye to eye with. If there was a problem, all of us had to be calm enough to put everything on the table and communicate with each other transparently so that we could get over it. All of us understood that it was vital for us to work together to get through the problem-solving and decision-making process.
Having come to that understanding, it was easy for us to move forward with out project. We discussed openly about the options that each of us had at first suggested, made a list of pros and cons for each of the options and then analysed which would be the best for us to go for. All of us agreed that we would work on analysing the health care system in different countries and comparing and contrasting the type of delivery as well as the quality of patient care to ours in the US. That was because there were many reports that drew comparisons between different health care delivery systems across the world and therefore we would have a lot of materials and references, and for a project that we would have to work on in-depth for the rest of the semester, we needed something that we could get our hands on a lot of resources for. And there it was, decision made and problem solved.
After that, whenever I had to work in a team with other people whether it was in class, outside of class, at home, or wherever else, I kept it firmly in mind that communication was most important so I could work effectively with my team members to solve problems and make decisions about what we had to do to achieve our goal.