To Team or Not to Team

Teams or no teams? There are positives and negatives about working in teams. Some people in the group prefer to not do anything and have the other team members do the heavy lifting. Working in teams also needs a lot of responsibility, such as to rely on your peers to do their work and to show up on time. During class we worked on an activity, Social Media Peer Account, which helped our class to get understanding of one outside of school. The activity consisted of going on someone's social media account and have an understanding from what the images or videos posted expressed about the person. I did this activity on Kyla, and I got a good understanding about how she is out of school. She posts a lot of videos of the places that she's been to, and lots of pictures with her friends. I learned a lot about Kyla just by looking through her social media accounts. Compared to my social media accounts, I would say that we have the same characteristic to care about our friends. Although it seems like we share some characteristics just by comparing our social media accounts it can be said that I believe that working in teams will make the process slower and must worry more about my work and my partners. While working alone I keep myself in check and only must worry about the work I do.  

In class we did a team building activity called Lost at Sea, where they gave us a scenario about being lost at sea and only having 15 things and we had to order them from the most important to the least important. At first, we categorized them ourselves, then we compared lists with our team and come up with a list we all agreed on. I would say that my list was much more different than the one my teammates had. We then compared the list that we created with our team to the activities list and we were very close to their answers. If I had done this activity alone, I would have not gotten that close to the answers the activity had but I thought about the importance of the items in a different way than my team members did.  

Working in a team you can split up the work and get things done faster, but everyone has different schedules during the day and might not be able to finish their part of the work by a time the other members want. According to one of the articles, “’I recommended that she use The Five Behaviors; it's the operating system for teamwork. Once that's established you have a framework to build from,’” this quote states that you can be put in a group and not know anyone and you have to make time to know each other before you can continue to work as you get an understanding about everyone. Even if you’re in a group where you know everyone, you still need a method to work harder, and that takes time to accomplish but it has a great outcome, “The Five Behaviors is a reliable tool that helped lay the foundation for further development” to work well with a group you need to be able to understand each other.  

Teams take a lot of patience and everyone has a different mindset,” Love, friendship, collaboration and the common good aren't words we usually equate with collecting art,” this quote can establish that many other people view words and phrases in a different way than others which can cause debates. If it was me, I wouldn’t want to fight or argue about the difference in words for our project. I'd rather work alone and have a lot of work to do but manage my time in a way where I won't be stressed and finish on time.  Working alone may be the better choice in my case as I am a very independent girl and doesn't like to be the team leader. I am the type of person who will change their mind on the original idea to create an even better one, and if I were in a group that could slow the process down even further.