To Team or Not To Team

 For my magazine portfolio, I’ve chosen to work on the project on my own. There are a variety of reasons, why, including the fact that I’m remote learning right now, and the exercises we’ve been doing in class have reinforced this choice. While I’m always open to working together with someone, I tend to do better on my own. When I’m working on something by myself, I know exactly what I have to get done and from there I can plan out when I’m going to do which component of the project. Not having to worry about a partner and if they’re doing what they need to do takes a lot of stress out of the project and lets me focus on the magazine itself. 

I’m usually very independent, and I like to plan out exactly what needs to be done. Working alone would be beneficial because I already have a good amount of ideas about what to do for the magazine portfolio and it would be better for me to narrow down my ideas and settle on one rather than accommodate another person’s ideas as well. Furthermore, because I’m learning remotely, communication with another person may prove to be difficult and make the overall project tedious. This project sounds interesting, and I would like to put my effort into the project itself rather than finding ways to communicate regularly with someone while learning from home. 

During class, we did the Social Media Peer Account exercise and the Lost at Sea exercise. I couldn’t participate fully in the Social Media exercise because I don’t have any social media myself, but I researched a celebrity’s social media and found that I could complete adequate research by myself. The Lost at Sea exercise was more helpful in determining if I should work alone or with someone else; I ended up scoring better in the exercise than when we split off into groups and discussed it. One thing I did enjoy about working in a group, however, was the difference in opinion that led to productive discussion. One article we read discusses this, saying “In other words, diversity in skills and knowledge combined with a balance of personality types is desirable for effective teams.” The other article outlined five pillars of teamwork ( trust, conflict, commitment, accountability, and results), and with the exception of better results, I think we followed all of them. Although the two scores were relatively similar, I much preferred using my own logic to determine the ranking of each object than conceding to the opinions of a group I may or may not agree with. 

Although working with a partner or team would be interesting, as outlined by the article “The effect of personality type on team performance”, especially seeing the confluence of personality types and strengths of each person, I think working alone would be beneficial for me in the long run.