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Noah Lau

Jorge Cerna

Humanities ⅓

15 March 2019

Case Study - Collaboration Essay

Collaboration directly impacts the way people grow and develop as a person through

meaningful experiences. In many instances, when collaborating with a group of people there will

be struggles whether it be dividing the work or working with people who can’t remediate your

flaws. Working in a group is beneficial as it helps people grow by improving social skills and

allowing people to understand their weaknesses and what they can do to solve them.

Collaboration allows people to improve their social skills in a professional

environment. In ​4 Team Collaboration Challenges and How to Overcome Them​, it talks about

how a lack of collaboration skills lead to businesses being very individualized with an abundance

of conflict within the organization. Factors like no team governance, lack of transparency,

competition, and poor engagement severely reduce a team’s efficiency and typically leads to

poor performance. It’s shown that collaboration directly impacts how strong you can

communicate and put away your pride to work as a team. By collaborating with a group, key

social skills can be improved and allow a better product/service when working efficiently as a

team. Additionally, in ​4 Team Collaboration Challenges and How to Overcome Them,​ it states

that “over two-thirds of employee’s time (more than six hours out of almost nine hours worked)

was spent communicating with other people”. This demonstrates the usage of collaboration in the

work environment and how crucial communication is, especially when working as a team.
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Without the need to collaborate, people wouldn’t have to spend as much time communicating,

but previous experiences of collaboration have led people to understand the importance of

communication. Along with improving social skills, collaboration allows you to create a near

perfect team if the composition is correct.

Understanding how to put together an efficient team comes from collaborating with

people and being able to see people’s strengths and weaknesses. In ​4 Team Collaboration

Challenges and How to Overcome Them​ says, “To empower each team member, focus on their

strengths rather than working around their weaknesses”. By focusing on everyone’s strengths,

you’ll be able to position everyone the best as possible. This allows people to hone in on what

they do best because each team member to produce the best thing they can do. Collaborating

with people allows everyone to focus on what each person does best. Additionally, this allows

your group members to cover up potentially weaknesses others may have, which creates a nearly

perfect team. Along with that, in ​The Collaboration Paradox: Why Working Together Often

Yields Weaker Results​, talks about the most effective way to work as a group, which is to work

with people who compliment your skills. Again another paper backs the belief that the best way

to collaborate is to create a group composing of people who compliment each other’s skills. By

combining everyone’s skills, a group can come together to create a near perfect product, rather

than one flawed person trying to create an imperfect product. These collaborations greatly impact

the growth of people by allowing people to understand their weaknesses more while others can

give input on how you can overcome these struggles. Lastly, in ​The Collaboration Paradox: Why

Working Together Often Yields Weaker Result​, say “Skill duplication leads to power struggles”.

This highlights the negatives of collaboration and how it can negatively impact a company. If
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everyone had the same set of skills, there would be competition on who gets to do what, because

they would all want similar tasks. This scenario causes civil conflict which leads to poorer

performance/products.

Collaboration directly impacts people in a positive way by allowing them to build social

skills in a professional environment and understanding one’s strengths and weaknesses and

utilizing that in a team. It’s shown that people build social skills through collaboration due to the

amount of communication used in a daily work day and how businesses need collaboration to

sustain or else they may be competing with themselves. People also practice one’s strengths by

collaborating by taking on tasks that suits one's strengths and asking for help or allowing others

to do tasks that you’re not as strong as. In other texts, there are other arguments that can be made

such as different points of views being introduced in collaboration and how collaboration can

cause people to conform with the majority when it may not be the right answer. This essay

covers only a small scope of life and how collaboration affects people.
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Works Cited

4 Team Collaboration Challenges and How to Overcome Them

The Collaboration Paradox: Why Working Together Often Yields Weaker Results