How to have awesome team experiences

It begins with you.

For the majority of my university life, I along with most of my friends thought that group projects were designed specifically by our professors to make our lives miserable. Yes, we knew that group projects are a significant part of the learning process. These projects teach us essential skills that are vital in a real-life work environment, and they highlighted that we need to learn how to collaborate with both like minded and not-so-like minded people.

Yet, group projects were mostly always a nightmare and it hardly ever felt like a collaboration. The actual project topic was almost never the problem; the people were. The groups would include students from different years and from different majors. Inevitably, this would lead to a schedule conflict. Group sizes would often be so big (6-8 people) that deciding on a mutual time to meet would become a task in itself. To expect a full attendance would be idealistic and one needed to always be prepared for a last minute cancellation. In addition to that, there would be the need vs. want conflict between students taking the class to fill a credit requirement and those taking it because they genuinely want to.

This whole ordeal really baffled me because I have always been passionate about people. As much as I like to do work on my own, I strongly believe that there are certain tasks which require collaboration in order to create something larger than the sum of its parts.

After suffering through a number of group projects, something changed in my final year.Group projects stopped being so bad. Instead, they actually became extremely rewarding.

What happened?

I realised that I am a constant in groups; that my behaviour, attitude and actions play a significant role in shaping my experiences with a team. The secret to awesome collaboration is simple: it begins with the you, the individual.

Here are the two big realisations that got me started:

1) You have to give what you hope to get

If you want your group to be enthusiastic, bubbling with energy, hardworking, you need to echo these attributes as well. If you want to take a project seriously and also have fun with it, to engage a group of people and get them to give it their all, to have productive meetings where you sketch out ideas, criticise, and start again until you have the best idea, then you really need to put in the time and energy that you expect out of others.

Consider this thought: Some people in my group are always late and they live on campus. I live far away and it takes me a lot of time to come in, yet I am always on time. I don’t want to bother showing up on time because it’s not fair.

We make excuses for ourselves. For one reason or other, we decide to benchmark ourselves against the standards of other people’s bad behaviour (being late, cancellations, and the like). The unfairness of the situation caused by someone else’s bad behaviour gives us room to slack.

This is the pivotal moment that choice comes in. You can come in late for the future meetings, or you can make a choice to come on time, prepared, with ideas, energy and enthusiasm to share with the people that do show up on time — even if it’s just one or two of them. Positive energy and enthusiasm are infectious. This will yield far better results than giving up/ not trying because something about the situation was unfair. (And isn’t life always unfair, a good lesson to learn at university.)

2) Figure yourself out

I am drawn to creativity and always want to challenge myself to think of ideas that are different. Ideas that are unique not just for the sake of standing out, but so that they are memorable, make an impact and achieve results. I recommend starting with really big ideas because I have found that most of the times, you will have to downsize it anyway when you start getting into the practicality of it. Therefore it’s better to start with a really big idea and make it medium, than to start with a small idea and make it tiny.

Unsurprisingly, not everyone is like this. I have a good friend that I have worked with on numerous projects at university. She is one of the most efficient and organized people I know. She is all about being practical and getting things done. We don’t always agree. She sometimes wanted to work out the details when I still wanted to generate ideas. I didn’t mind that we had to change the direction of our project once we got started. She worried that it would make us fall behind schedule. The truth is that, some of my favorite and best projects have been with her. We don’t always agree but it doesn’t mean that we always disagree and this is where the magic happens.

Figure yourself out, understand your strengths, your weaknesses, your pattern of thoughts. Then you will be able to appreciate the differences in people. You will understand that diversity is way more than people from different cultures and different educational backgrounds (as it is often defined). Diversity can exist in how people with different personalities, characteristics and skills complement yours.

This is much easier said that done. We are attracted to familiarity, we like people who think like us and who agree with us. It takes a conscious effort to realise that other people’s opinions, comments, and criticism can add value to the overall project by bringing in a fresh perspective.

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Finally, I acknowledge that there are several other factors beyond the individual that play a part in shaping amazing team experiences. That will be for another day.