Generally speaking, it’s more easy, fun, productive and nice to work with people who:
- Show commitment
- Respect deadlines
- Are proactive
- Work for a common goal
- Listen to other’s opinion
- Are Givers
Often you need to work with people who don’t have all or some of these characteristics, and this happens often to me in university project, especially when you need to work with people who have a complete different background in terms of culture, language, education and professional experience.
You need to find out ways to improve the outcome of the entire group taking in mind that you’re not in a power position and that you need to gain respect of people who don’t really know you.
Also, you don’t have enough time to create a trust relation bite by bite, you need something effective that works now.
I think it’s not enough to write in the curriculum that you have done team working. Everyone can do team working with a team based on people with the characteristic expressed before, but only some people actually have the ability to lead and manage (or simple work with) an imperfect team. Imperfect is normal
It’s a crucial aspect of education and is particularly taugh when you face language and cultural barriers. But at the same time if you want your skills to be future-proof you need to find way to manage this imperfect, but frequent situation, because in the future we will be more and more immersed in multicultural (and unpredictable) environment.
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