Teamwork

I have found some of my favourite people in the world while working with them. Working with great people has made me the hardworking woman I am today. They were once part of my daily routine, making it more engaging, lighter, and merrier, while also teaching me valuable lessons.

"I understand that not every co-worker has to be your friend, but I believe we are fortunate to develop friendly relationships with the people we work with."

I visualise teamwork as a very raw survival skill. I envision teamwork in the past in a very primitive context where humans needed to go out hunting to provide safety for themselves and their communities. I can’t imagine the number of tasks to do to succeed in performing it, but I definitely must have been more reliable if working as a team with peers. Without any kind of modern tools, even language, but a very strong instinct for survival in my vision, people had to trust their lives to others!

In today's world, it's challenging to imagine what it was like to venture out in such a different context, but our survival instincts remain imprinted in our contemporary life systems. To me, working feels like a modern-day version of hunting. At the workplace, we must do our best to achieve our goals to secure the team’s shelter and sustenance, and to me, that matters. With this in mind, I believe empathy is inherently linked to good team performance.

I believe that a team naturally develops a unique and evolving set of values that build team rituals. 

In my experience, I’ve noticed both work-oriented rituals and more personal ways of interacting with peers, and from being aware of both I have learned that it fosters communication that translates into efficient collaboration.

For example, during brainstorming sessions with one of my colleagues, we begin by praising each other’s ideas and expressing their potential achievability. After this initial positivity, we have an established speech to ask the other to transition to more constructive criticism, and then we go through all ideas again to narrow down, and then we start pointing more objectively certain things the other hasn’t seen beforehand. -Yes, we could begin pointing out things objectively from the start, but there is no harm in doing our ritual of positivity. It has always made us feel comfortable expressing every idea without hesitation.

As designing I my life’s passion, I feel deeply fortunate whenever I get the chance to collaborate with a design team. However, as part of a collaborative and skilled team, whether it’s design-related or not, I feel empowered to conquer any challenge!