The Power of Collaboration in Communications: Make our Differences work together

Group work fosters comprehension and helps the team to brainstorm more ideas than what we can do individually.

I have always been a person who likes to work by myself because it gives me more control over what I do and the outcomes I want to achieve. It usually means that I don’t have to worry about agreeing to another person’s ideas. However, this is not always a good way to work in communications assignments because it limits the things I can do and usually takes more time to figure out important parts of the project. I believe time is crucial when I need to work on a project where I am in charge of choosing the topic, such as in a newsletter.

While working on the newsletter project, I learned the importance of group work to create a higher-quality product. During this project, we had to brainstorm ideas for the topic we were going to select. At first, it was a little difficult because we did not have many things in common. Every person shared their interests, and each one was very different than the others. Then, we thought about using the things we did not have in common to find a topic that could bring the differences together. The main difference was that each person was from a different country, so we decided that it would be a great idea to create a fictional restaurant that serves food from a different country each day of the week. We could come up with this idea because we were several people and worked together to brainstorm something that we would not have been able to do individually.

After we decided on the topic, we assigned each person a specific task to complete. These tasks helped me learn that working in a group requires responsibility and effort from each member to provide quality work. Each member of the group used their knowledge to explain their part, which made the newsletter attractive and provided enough information about the restaurant.

When I ponder my future in the communications field, I think that knowing that I will have a team to work with prepares me to be more capable in the different tasks I can perform. Those teams will have different people with perspectives that may differ from mine, but as a team, we can make even our differences work together to achieve the outcomes desired in every project. In the end, working by myself makes me have more control, but group work provides a more effective environment for fostering collaboration and higher-quality work.