Why Working In Groups Is Crucial For Your Individual Success
As a student in Newhouse’s advertising master’s program, the majority of my work is done in groups. In itself, according to Professor Kevin O’Neill, advertising is “five smart people on a mission.” Different aspect of the industry all tie together within the campaign process to create an intersection of disciplines and viewpoints. No matter what, there never is any true independent work; even when doing work alone, it’s always going to get reviewed by and contributed to by members of a team, sometimes of a different discipline than you.
The first thing I’ve come to realize is that timeliness becomes more difficult to adhere to when you’re on a team with multiple members. The more members, the more difficult it gets to coordinate and stay on track. Personally, I’m busy with class and work hours from around 9 a.m. every day until 5 p.m., so that leaves me with the evening hours after a full day to get any group work done as a team. On a small team with 4-5 people, that’s 3-4 other varying schedules to coordinate with my small window of availability on the week days. Whether its advertising or something else, working in a group on an intensive project can teach you how to be conscious of the effort it takes to properly coordinate a schedule for multiple people and ensure that you’re getting your work done in time for someone else to do their part.
Working in groups, I’ve also learned a lot about criticism, both for myself and others. Individually you can learn how to take criticism smoothly, and if you’re smart, use that criticism to find out where your weak points are (we all have at least a few) and work on improving them. People tend to have different work personalities and social personalities to a degree, so it would be helpful to understand what kind of criticism different people need to hear. If you already know a person in your personal life, it may surprise you that they don’t warmly receive the type of criticism you might think to give them.
Sometimes, the best thing about being in a group can be digging into the personalities of the members. People often think about who they want to work with in a group, but shy away from addressing who they don’t want to work with as well. After completing the first half of an intensive one-year master’s program, I can honestly say that there’s a list of people I don’t want to work with again or at all. The difference in personalities can make or break a group’s success, push you to various emotional breaking points, and teach you more about what makes you and others tick. Recently, I worked with someone who would consistently say no to ideas, but never had any rationale for their objections (mostly just a “I just feel like it isn’t right” type of statement) and hardly ever offered a suggestion for improvement throughout the entire project. I’m grateful to have worked with this type of person, however counterproductive they may have been, because it taught me how to appropriately handle that person when addressing an idea or issue.
There is a lot of good and bad to working in groups, but the bad ultimately results in good self-improvement and awareness.
