Review of The Positives of Working in a Team

What is the key to success? In the world, cooperation can be seen everywhere nowadays, people proceed to achieve their anticipative goal through everyone’s mutual effort. Mankind had realized the significance of teamwork from the earliest times. In current day, the idea of collaboration is still embedded in people’s minds while working in a team.

Centuries ago, one of the greatest instances about collaboration was when the culture and language of the French Canadians were having a high risk of being challenged during the lower and upper Canada Rebellion. Instead of giving up hope, they came together more as a team. Through their exertion, the French language was recognized in the parliament and their culture was sustained. The French Canadians inspired other groups to work as a team to overcome difficulties. If it was not for their attempts, Canada could still solely be an English speaking community, and would not be the bilingual society we live in currently.

Looking back at history, when individuals leave their differences behind and work towards a common goal can they achieve success. In our society, a small task often involves collaboration when there are more than participants.

Recently, joining the Gleneagle Secondary School volunteer club in this summer school had taught me multiple communication skills. Gleneagle has set out a series of activities attracting students and teachers to donate to the SHARE charity. SHARE is a non-profit, independent, community-based organization which provides residents of the Tri-cities help with their economic difficulties. In order to gain more donation, we had freezies, candy bags, and brownies sell during break times as a club, and every step in the process includes teamwork. Specifically, the procedure of creating the candy bags worked out a lot faster the second time, as we were more experienced with it. In order to finish making twenty bags before the break, we found it the fastest to work together - each person stays with one type of candy, and take a few to place into the plastic candy bag in my hand. Eventually, we could be proud of the donations we have made for SHARE as a club, hoping them to help more residents in need.

In contrast, failed collaborations have also occurred during my last school year. I am a student in the International Baccalaureate program in Port Moody Secondary, and last year all the IB students were required to come up with an Interdisciplinary project based on the topic of Community. Since we were randomly put into groups, the four members in my group did not know each other, we all felt so awkward in the beginning. Even though we had the entire school year to work on this project, we could never meet as a full group in every meeting, owing to the lack of communication we had about our different schedules. As a result, our rate of progress was much slower than other teams. Therefore, we did not pass on the due day while disappointing the teacher at the same time. Fortunately, our teacher had given us a precious second chance. We finally sat down as a group and began to exchange ideas and come up with a new presentation. From this experience, I truly learned that when a group of individuals work together, there is bound to be friction because of differing viewpoints, but people come to a compromise to prevent the downfall of a group.

All in all, Soldiers do not think of their glory and fame when fighting for their country. They put the nation before self. In history books and in reality, we have always seen the victory of teams and the downfall of individuals. This is the beauty of teamwork.