Follow Up on Team-Working Skills

In last blog I briefly introduced the importance of teamwork. Now we are going to look closely and focus on distinguishing whether the circumstances are suitable for teamwork.

Which Circumstances Are Suitable & Which Are Not?

Obviously we don’t team work all the time. But how can we tell in which circumstances it is better for us to team up and in which we should just work alone? Let’s see some bad examples first.

Example #1

Last semester my friend Cathy and I took accounting course and the workload was very heavy. A Thursday night, a night before a weekly homework was due, overwhelmed by those practice problems, Cathy and I decided to “team work” a little bit. Reached an agreement, we split up the questions by half and each did only half of them, then we shared our answers in order to finish the assignment as quickly as possible.

Example #2

Another example from my past experience might be more common among college students. My friend Cathy, again, and I decided to go to the library and study together. I was working on an essay while she was doing her calculus homework. As I was typing my theories, she turned on me and asked for help on a question. So I stopped my thoughts to work on the question. When I was trying to continue from where I was interrupted, she came again asking me to explain another question. Just like that, I was interrupted several times and spent a lot more time than I expected.

Above are typical examples of the wrong use of teamwork. When it comes to tasks like course assignments, we have to finish them independently for personal growth. The ultimate goal of team-working is to improve personal values by learning and sharing with others and improve productivity in the meantime, rather than interfering with each other’s process. For instance, an open-ended situation promotes the exchange of ideas, thereby people could potentially learn from each other by absorbing different perspectives. Or in complex situations involving different aspects of things, by team up with others and specializing, we could break a general task down to several tangible parts, thus greatly increasing the efficiency and productivity.