How Teamwork Can Revolutionize Your Life
This isn’t a team building exercise. This is a statement on why we need to be teams now more than ever before.
As a business student in university and having gone through the Canadian education system (like so many others) one thing that a lot of us dreaded was group projects. Maybe not so much in university and college, however that deep rooted resentment or dread of group projects loomed over us in middle and high school.
But now that I’m older and wiser, I know better. I know that it is foolish to push people away or to dread group projects.
Yet we still do to some extent.
There are many people with a lone wolf mentality, not to mention we still have old customs that we cling to.
It’s time to let that go and to look at teamwork in a critical light as a benefit to help us in a variety of ways.
I want to be looking at some of the distinct advantages of teamwork and how that can revolutionize your life.
The Lone Wolf Won’t Get Far
“Individual commitment to a group effort — that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.” — Vince Lombardi
For the vast majority of my life, I have been working on my own.
Even to this day, I do most of my business operation on my own with no one else to distribute the work. Some of that is due to the lack of funding at the time I’m writing this. But I do have intentions to rely on other people.
It was only a few years ago I did everything myself. And though I still do the vast majority of my work, I have opened up to other people and have paid and looked for help in certain areas.
I know I had to do that because lone wolf thinking is dangerous. At least with regards to building a business and growing yourself.
By all means we shouldn’t be depending entirely on other people to do everything for us. There should be some level of dependability on ourselves to bolster ourselves too.
But that isn’t a reason to dismiss every single person. At times we do need to delegate and we have to put our faith in others.
This is especially true in areas where we’re not as skilled.
Of course you can learn new things over time, but it’s foolish to not rely on others who have been practicing what you are practicing for far longer.
There is a wealth of knowledge from those individuals that you otherwise wouldn’t have access to on your own.
If you rely on yourself entirely, you do have the potential to succeed eventually, however the journey will go faster if you have a team.
Teams Solve Problems Faster
“The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team.” — Phil Jackson
When you have a good quality team, you’ll be able to deal with problems faster.
When a team is formed you have a collective pool of knowledge and experiences to make that a possibility.
The longer the people work and grow in a particular field, the more they have gone through problems and grew from the experiences.
Those strengths can be leveraged by every member of the group and it’s a powerful resource.
One Person Flourishes, The Group Flourishes
“Collaboration allows teachers to capture each other’s fund of collective intelligence.” — Mike Schmoker
I’ve been experiencing this first hand with my accountability partner and I.
Even with a small group as this one, we’ve been able to motivate ourselves to do more in our own ways.
Part of that is due to the small victories that we have achieved over the past year since we’ve been setting weekly goals.
It’s these small victories that we share with one another to help motivate ourselves.
This same concept can also apply to large groups as well.
When something works, people talk about their experiences and what they are learning.
They share that openly with the group so others can apply it and provide more guidance and support.
Try This
In many self improvement books they talk about having groups of people working together. It’s time to stop reading up how to do that and instead start taking action on it.
If you are stuck on that though and haven’t read up any books that talk about teamwork, don’t worry. I’ll be covering that tomorrow for you.
To your growth!
Eric S Burdon
This post is part of an 3 month writing challenge that I’m committing myself to. Every day for 3 months, I’ll be writing articles with specific criteria in mind. You can learn all about my reasoning as well as what that criteria is right here. This is 26 of 91 of this series.
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