My experiences with collaboration have always been pretty mixed. Some key factors that play a part in this mainly include how comfortable I am with the team I'm working with and whether I'm leading the team or just following someone else. There's been a fair share of students, me included, who often strongly dislike collaboration, because more often than not you'll be put into a group where an uneven amount of work is done by each person. The slackers will typically agree with whatever the main person says and not really add much to the collaborative work. Then you have others who will pitch in a good amount of work when specifically told their piece to add on. Then there's the leader, who will pitch the ideas and help distribute the work within team members. These have been the main types of tropes I find whenever I work on a group project for school, or even in the workplace. In the creative field, like filmmaking, I feel like because everyone is passionate about the same thing, collaboration has a kinder energy, where parties will work together through agreements and disagreements on what ideas are possible and even potential outcomes.What I've found that works is working with people who you are comfortable with and who are respectful. With these kinds of people, I typically like to lead the “pack” and have found that giving each person an equal piece of the work usually keeps them accountable, therefore leading to them actually completing the task. I would also make sure to ask everyone whether there was something that could be added to my idea and be open to receiving opinions or feedback and make choices as needed. If I'm not leading the group, I play a pretty neutral role where I give my feedback when asked, and if not, I'll follow whatever I was told to do in order to contribute an equal amount of work to my team.Of course, there are also things that don’t work well in collaboration.

 

One of the biggest problems is when one person ends up doing most of the work while the rest of the group doesn’t contribute much. I think almost everyone who has done group projects has experienced that at least once. It can be frustrating because the people who didn’t really help still receive the same credit as the person who carried most of the project. At the same time, doing everything yourself also isn’t really the solution. Even if the final result might turn out better, it defeats the purpose of the assignment being collaborative in the first place. Another issue that can hurt collaboration is when people don’t listen to each other’s ideas. A group usually works better when everyone at least feels like their opinion is being considered.Overall, my experiences with collaboration have shown me that it can either work really well or become frustrating depending on the people involved. When groups communicate clearly, divide the work fairly, and stay open to each other’s ideas, collaboration can actually make a project easier and sometimes even better than working alone. On the other hand, when the work isn’t balanced or people stop contributing, the whole process becomes harder than it needs to be. Because of this, I still have mixed feelings about collaboration, but I do understand why it’s an important skill to practice. In school and in real life, there will always be situations where people need to work together, and learning how to handle that is part of the experience. 

 

3 Related Links:

 

https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/employee-relations/unlocking-team-potential-effective-collaboration-common-pitfalls

 

 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4360764/ 

 

https://journalwjarr.com/sites/default/files/fulltext_pdf/WJARR-2025-0343.pdf