Collaboration

When I think of an effective team, I think of a group of people that can work together and push past problems and difficulties to create a successful product or outcome. To collaborate means to work together in a sense that everybody brings their own skills and ideas to the table and evaluate everything together until an end product has been made. People can bounce ideas off of one another in order to figure out what will work and what will not work. The difference between collaborating and simply “group work” is that often “group work” is done in an inefficient and unevenly distributed way. Different members step up to be the leader, and they end up doing most of the work while the others just watch and talk. But collaboration encompasses even distribution of work to all members of the group and the brainstorming is done together. The benefit of collaboration instead of "group work" is that each member will learn how to pull their own weight in group settings, as well as hear and modify their ideas and other people's ideas by working toward a similar goal.