Ever wondered how many different kinds of people you come across in your daily life? There are those who always like to be the centre of attention, and can chatter all day long just to keep the attention going, whereas there are others who would believe in the phrase “Silence is golden”. Some go with the saying “work fast, or forever hold your pace”, while others would argue “slow and steady wins the race”.
We belong to a world consisting of people of different cultural backgrounds, different mindsets, different ideas, different opinions and different methods of working, and thus I'd say
“Our strength should lie in these differences and not just in similarities”.
I myself am experiencing a diverse cultural interaction in my student life. I am an Indian, currently studying in a university of Singapore where I'm required to work with students from China, Vietnam, Singapore, U.K, U.S et al, and I'd have to say it's been GREAT fun. Learning about different cultures and interacting with different people made me realize how true the saying "Variety is the spice of life" really is.
While working in a multi-cultural environment, differences in each individual team member’s perspective are bound to arise. But what we must remember in such a scenario is that the common bond that links us all is nothing but the team we represent.
Clearly while working as a team, it is the job at hand, that needs to be given utmost priority, and in order to ensure that it be done effectively, what is necessary is that there be a healthy exchange and intermixing of ideas and a good level of understanding between each member of the team. This is only possible if each person learns to respect his or her team mates. We must learn to put aside prejudices and preconceived notions, be courteous and respectful of each other and participate actively in each discussion. And most importantly, we should never let language be a barrier, which is often the main cause of all the awkwardness. Only then will we be able to make diversity our forté and not our weakness.
Thus to summarize I’d like to quote:
“Coming together is the beginning;
keeping together is progress;
working together is success”.
Indeed effective team work can move *mountains* glaciers
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Hi Sasha
ReplyDeleteYou provided a valid point that within a team, we should use our differences to our advantage rather than casting them aside and blaming them as hurdles to effective teamwork. More often than not, misunderstandings arise even before we interact with each other. To make matters worse, we frequently send out the wrong signals while communicating, due to a difference in perception between the encoder and decoder. To work as a team, team members need to accept each other’s difference; and realise that these differences can carry a positive connotation with them. So long as we are able to find a niche area for each member with regards to the assignment and each member is willing to provide and receive feedbacks; things would then proceed seamlessly.
All in all, instead of trying to make a team to work, we should make the team work for all of us =)
Cheers
Hi Sasha,
ReplyDeleteI agree on the point that “Our strength should lie in these differences and not just in similarities”. In fact, I believe that it is because of these differences that a group of people can eventually complete a tasking successfully. It is all these differences that set each one of us different from the other. It is these differences that made us unique, special and the ability to complete different tasks properly in our way. In a team tasking, it is unavoidable that the ultimate goal(ultimate project) is made up of several small goal(small parts of the project such as collecting survey, presenting solution, think of ideas or even typing the report in proper English!). As such, it is vital that we learn to communicate with one another. Find out the differences and from there, the team gets things sorted beautifully and efficiently. That would be good teamwork.
-kaiyang