Teamwork Experience

Another Assignment for My English Class

If I had to choose one medical term to describe my general teamwork experience before I joined my current team, I would definitely go with Dead on Arrival. I have read the advantages of working in a team, but those advantages assumed an ideal team while I almost never had one.  Instead of making me more productive, my previous teams successfully made me feel lazy, inadequate, and or confused.  I have three categories for them; the underachieving team, the do-what-you-want-to-do team, and the over-competitive team.

The first type of team was the underachieving team. It was the worst of all three. I experienced this kind of team at school. My fellow teammates seemed to give up at every bump on the road as if they did not have any motivation to finish the task. I gave them little nudges every day, but at the end, 24 hours before the deadline, I always burned the midnight oil to finish the team’s assignment.  I was pissed, but I never snitched them out because at that moment, I thought that it did not really matter and the tasks were not that difficult. However, after all these years, I realized that actually, I was afraid. I did not want to become one of those kids who have a difficult time getting social acceptance.  

The second one, the do-what-you-want-to-do team, appeared when we had a leaderless bunch of smart, but uncompetitive people.  All of the members knew the goal; most of them understood what needed to be done and how to do it.  The phrase “most of them” meant that some of the team members were left out. Unluckily, I was part of the some.  At that particular moment, the university had not assigned a supervisor for me yet.  Consequently, I was extremely confused. I decided to wait for everyone to finish their part, analyzed the gap, and filled it.  It was not a smart move since I had to wait until the last minute to finish my assignment, but I did not find any other solution. So, I stuck with that method.

The third type of team was the over-competitive team.  This was the kind of team I often met at the university.  Team members were at each others’ throats. Once, I had a team that could not come into agreement on the analysis of Michael Porter’s Diamond and at the presentation session, they just presented their own individual ideas and frequently negated other members’ conclusions and hypotheses.  Since I was the youngest and less-experienced member, I felt inadequate to compete with their ideas. Fortunately, my academic supervisor was more than supportive. He helped me swim around those piranhas without getting my fingers bitten off.

In summary, my experience working in a team was as morbid as a patient with no pulse.  Fortunately, the patient has not shown obvious sign of decomposition or other injuries not compatible with life and my current team appeared to be able to perform wonderful CPR. So, here I am enjoying the flow of ideas and jokes from other members and trying to give at least the same amount of support for them.

Dya