Most of the collaborations I’ve experienced so far has been from school group works, and since I’ve gone from Business school to Graphic Design, I’ve worked on different groups with different dynamics. From those group collaborations, the best approach for me has been the ‘Partner’ because we value having equal work and we all listen each other’s ideas instead of having one person have all the ideas and then the others only execute them or one does all the work and the others barely contribute. And so, I’ve been fortunate enough to have most of my group collaboration have that ‘Partner’ approach, however, there were still some that weren’t that approach and was pretty terrible.
One great experience I had was when my team and I did a project in International Business Law about intellectual properties. My team had divided the work equally and also had our ideas be heard. I felt that we were successful in our project because we had our professor praise our work so much that he wanted to use our work as an example in his other classes in a different school.
On the other hand, the worst collaboration I’ve experienced was when I had to be the one doing all the work and the other team members barely did anything. Thinking about this now, the perfect example of this was not from school but from my part time job. It was really frustrating that my other team member handed me a barely done work and I had to struggle doing all the work and make it successful. They did not communicate well with me yet they kept on complaining. I had to vocalize this to my supervisor because this was not acceptable. It was one of the worst day I ever had so far and I never want to experience that ever again.
I think the best way to be successful in any and every group collaborations would be is to communicate and listen despite having difference in personality or methods of work! I really like Joe’s advice about designers collaborating with developers which is something along the lines of “empathize but don’t expect to be empathized.”