Over the years, I’ve discovered that working together on projects is something that can be both professionally rewarding and productive. The feeling of shared success – not to mention the shared knowledge and workload – mean that teamwork makes sense in many areas of our working lives. But where does that emotion come from and how can we harness aspects of ourselves from other parts of our lives into our everyday work?
Martial arts
Most people who know me are well aware that I love my Tai Chi. I’ve been doing it now for a number of years since a friend and I joined in on a session in a London churchyard, which we chanced upon one weekend whilst down there on holiday. I was well and truly bitten by the bug – how could anybody not like the gentle stretches, the smooth flowing movements and the all-pervading atmosphere of togetherness which I picked up from that first experience.
Tai Chi is short for T’ai chi chuan and is still relatively uncommon here in the UK. It’s an internal Chinese martial art which is practiced for defence training, health benefits and meditation. In addition to those elements, my experience of Tai Chi has also given me a sense of teamwork and community, especially as the group I’m a member of stuck together throughout the entire pandemic, performing our Tai Chi in the kitchen, the garden or the living room – if you could handle this new-fangled Zoom stuff!
The wider impact
But lately, besides the benefits of community and the chance to mindfully focus on inner thoughts, I’ve been struck also by the effectiveness of buddying up, which is a practice we use frequently. What a great opportunity to get another view on how to perform the techniques and even to share some of your own knowledge, albeit on a totally different level. I don’t know about you, but I don’t do this sort of thing often enough. Seduced by the thought of getting something done quickly and efficiently we go alone – streamlined and uncluttered, we think. What a pity that course of action is less rich, less fun, often yields less knowledge or a lesser result, and ultimately deprives you of the moral support needed to get on and accomplish more.
Go far, go together
Collaborating with fellow professionals can work on many levels. If you are working with someone within your own field of expertise, it can enhance you own skills, and share knowledge and other experience you have gained over time. This in turn can lead to your collaborator knowledge-sharing with you. Working with partners from different disciplines can be equally rewarding, as their expertise – say graphic design, or finance – might widen your knowledge, whilst at the same time creating a strong team and a great end result. In fact, there’s no better way to illustrate this than with the saying: “If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together”