Week #4

Individuals struggle with collaborating with others for a few reasons.  Depending on the situation, I think that these reasons can differ.  One of these reasons is the "if you want it done right, do it yourself" mentality.  This mentality applies to a lot of different situations -not just collaboration between organizations.  For example, I know that if I ask my roommate to clean the bathroom, she'll just do the bare minimum, but if I do it myself I know that I'll whip out my cleaning gloves, grab the disinfectant spray, and I'll get down on my hands and knees and scrub every nook and cranny.  When it comes to organizations collaborating together, I think that this mentality certainly impacts the collaboration.  Another reason for struggling to collaborate with others is that sometimes collaboration can feel counterproductive.  Sometimes collaboration feels like a hassle because you need to count on others to not only do their work, but also to communicate their progress with you.  In our busy college-lives I think that sometimes it seems easier to just keep the planning to your sisters because you know you'll at least see them every week and can check up on their progress at that time, whereas you can't count on those checkpoints with other organizations.

It can be extremely challenging when one or more members of a group do not want to work collaboratively.  Most people at some point or another become involved in a group project that is going in an unexpected direction.  Maybe you got a group project for a class, and you had a particular vision for the project, but your groupmates decided to go in a different direction.  In these scenarios, I think that the right thing to do is to go with what the group wants.  If you keep trying to fight for your ideas, you're wasting effort that could have been put towards accomplishing the project.  In these cases, I think that the "majority rules" rule should be implemented.  However, it's important to realize that you can still contribute your ideas into the project, even if the project wasn't your idea.

Usually the way things work in my chapter is that someone comes up with an innovative idea for an event. Although it is their vision, the whole entity helps out with the details.  This usually works out great for us because in this way we have at least one person who is completely invested in the event, but every individual gets her voice heard and gets some input into the event.  We have a very diverse group of girls, which is great because that means we get a variety of opinions and ideas to choose from when we plan events.