Works well alone

I remember my 6th grade class teacher writing on my report card:

Works well alone: A
Works well in a group: E

I've had loads of laughs telling that story to people over the years, so I won't say it again. But I got reminded of it because of an "incident" that occurred this weekend.

A friend of mine was doing a course project with three other team members, and it ended in total disaster. They sought my simulation expertise to pull them out of a tough spot, and I spent several hours helping them out. Once that was done, I returned to my own work; but they then had to seek another friend's programming expertise to pull them out of another spot. In spite of all the help they got, they were no further from solving their problem at the time of submission than they were at the time they received the project statement.

Notwithstanding the lack of computer skills, I could see that their problem was simply lack of coordination. They had neatly divided the work into four segments between them, but...

- None of them bothered to follow up with the others if they'd made progress with their work. So, all of them procrastinated till two days before the submission.

- Everybody assumed that one of the others could fill in his/her gap in computer skills, and didn't bother to check if that was indeed the case. So, when they found out that none of their group members knew simulation, they called me. When they found out that nobody was good at programming, they had to call another guy. And when you need to bring in outsiders into your project and explain stuff to them, it causes huge delays.

- Nobody bothered to sound out the others to check if their ideas were right. One guy came up with an algorithm, but didn't ask the others to check it for him. They, in turn, didn't have the patience or inclination to check something that wasn't their job. When the algorithm flopped, they were out of ideas and out of time.

- They forgot about dependency. If Part B can only be done after Part A, the person doing Part A should do it quite early.

At the end of it all, my friend says, "This is why I prefer to work alone."

That gave me quite a jolt, because I prefer to work alone as well. If I have to work in a group, I choose the smallest group. And I invariably end up doing the majority of the work myself, and redoing most of what the others did. I have this perfectionist nature when it comes to work, and little patience for ineptitude of any sort. So, I keep saying, "Never mind, I'll take care of it"... and naturally, most people are happy enough to accept my offer. This way, I get the job done with zero interpersonal skills and zero coordination and next to zero communication, through sheer... well, ego! I mean, I want a good grade for this, right? And if I need something done right, I do it myself.

However, as I watch my projects grow larger and larger, it occurs to me that there will come a stage when I simply can't do everything by myself. So I have to learn... somehow... how to manage, coordinate, communicate and work with other people. I should also learn how to work in a group on a peer-to-peer basis, without taking control and saying, "You just take care of this part, should be easy enough. I'll do that and that and that." I mean, if somebody spoke to me like that, we would probably have a sword duel on our hands.

There have been a few rare occasions when I've actually had the pleasure of working with companions who were much better than me at certain skills, such as preparing a presentation. There you have a neat division of labour... one guy does the job I considered dull (which, fortunately, he did not consider very dull), I do the job I consider interesting, and the other prepares the presentation while we explain to him approximately what we need to convey. There was even an occasion when I was a novice at the area we were working on, so I let my partner do most of the work and I had him explain it to me after that, and I did the documentation. I'm not proud of it, and when it became obvious to the professor that I didn't understand much about how the program worked, I got one of the lowest grades of my life.

I really have to get the hang of this teamwork thing, and do it in such a way that I don't have "Egotistic IITian" spelt in large red letters on my forehead.

Cheers,
Prashanth.