Working Together

It is necessary to work together with others in many situations. No matter how much effort one person puts into a project he or she could never do better than if they were working in the right group of people. However, the emphasis must be placed on the RIGHT group. Even with the best intentions, groups without true collaboration do not succeed as well as the ones that do have this dynamic. Collaboration is based upon trust and inclusiveness. These two attributes are sometimes hard to attain in a diverse group of people, but it also must be emphasized that diversity can bring differing opinions to a group and can produce greater success.

When groups work together though, they might fall into other categories such as compromise. This is most often the worst case scenario, because groups fail to reach the goal that they set or do not reach it to the best that they could have achieved. Compromises focus too much on being fair and is a quick fix for making everyone happy. Competition is better for the group, but does not help with working together with other groups. Competition can motivate individuals to do better, but it can sometimes lose sight of the true goal. I would rank cooperation as the step below collaboration, in which different groups work together to attain their individual goals. However, in varying cases, sometimes true collaboration is not necessary.

For example, if the situation is somewhat trivial, compromises can achieve a solution in a much shorter time. Think of designing a shirt for recruitment in the Greek community. A simple vote or compromise could determine which shirt to buy out of multiple designs. Then, the group could focus on the actual goal of recruitment rather than spending hours and maybe even days on collaboration to create the best shirt design. Competition is also healthy at times. Competition can be an easy way to motivate people to do better. Competition can set an easy goal of doing better than another group. This goal could be something that all the members of the group could relate to and achieve. A goal could be recruiting more members than Organization X and Y. However, this goal would usually leave out the creation of connections with Organization X and Y. Cooperation could also be better than collaboration if the groups were so extremely different that it would be too difficult to create mutual goals. Still, in most cases it is better to strive for collaboration as long as time allows. In the long term, collaboration will usually bring about a higher quality outcome than simply working together.