For many students, working on a team can be very stressful as it often can conjure up rather bad experiences. It can range from dealing with personalities, work styles, and initiating or responding to emails, etc. So, you may ask what the point is.
So, let’s define what it means to collaborate. According to Merriam-Webster, collaboration is "working jointly with others or together, especially in an intellectual endeavor". Other terms, such as teamwork and group work, may be used to refer to the idea of collaboration.
Working on a group project is a double win. You are building up your ‘hard’ skills by learning the course material and developing your interpersonal skills for solving real-world problems. While in your group, you are developing your ‘soft’ skills such as communication, cooperation, negotiation, leadership, and much more. So, arming yourselves with these relevant and transferable skill sets will make you invaluable in your future work organization.
There are four elements to building a successful team and it’s the leader’s role to ensure that it’s there.
1. Trust is a foundational component of building a healthy team. So, how do you build trust among your newly formed team by choice or assignment? A way is to ask each other questions, such as doing an ice-breaker activity.
2. Differences of opinion will likely arise within a team, such as personality clashes or differing opinions towards accomplishing a task—a couple of things to resolve this conflict constructively.
a. Expressing Yourself. You could start with “I” statements to effectively communicate your viewpoint.
b. Listen Actively. When you hear one of your team members offering their opinion, you can acknowledge what you heard by providing an empathic statement and then stating your views.
c. Follow Guidelines. Create and follow your team’s guidelines for settling matters.
3. There are two main underlying reasons team members are not committed to the project: consensus and certainty.
a. Consensus is having a general agreement on accomplishing the team’s main task. It unifies the team to work toward the same goal. While there may be differences of opinion on achieving the primary goal, working them through towards a consensus ensures that everyone’s voice is heard and will result in contributions from each team member.
b. Certainty provides a straightforward way to accomplish a goal without delays.
4. Accountability is a way of not only holding the team to a standard but also holding it individually. To do this, meeting regularly to discuss progress and challenges is essential.
References:
Lencioni, P. (2002). The five dysfunctions of a team: a leadership fable (1st ed.). Jossey-Bass.
Merriam Webster, (n.d.) Collaborate. In Merriam-Webster.com dictionary. Retrieved from March 13, 2025, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/collaboration
Zacarian, D., & Silverstone, M. (2020). Teaching to empower : taking action to foster student agency, self-confidence, and collaboration. ASCD.