Blog 4

In a world where everyone is a part of groups or teams I find that many people interchange the words collaborate, cooperate, and compromise. The biggest difference is that collaboration is reaching a mutual goal, something that the whole group agrees on. I think this is very hard in groups because everyone has different opinions and no one ever wants to deviate from what they want to do. Because of this there is usually always compromise or cooperation and not collaboration. Personally I view collaboration as the most successful way to get people together since everyone is reaching a common goal instead of cooperating on individual goals or compromising to meet in the middle. It is challenge when one or more members does not to work collaboratively you have to somehow convince them that the idea or project is worth their time, sell it to them so they will want to work together to reach that common goal. I believe competition can be motivation to collaborate if the competition is with another organization. I know from personal experience Delta Zeta comes together to collaborate and reach a common goal of winning when they are competing against other organizations or teams. This was recently demonstrated when our buckeyethon team collaborated and all had a common goal of being the top Greek fundraising team. With the competition of beating other teams our women collaborated to raise as much money as they could, because of this we were the greek chapter that raised the most money for Nationwide Children's Hospital and Children's Miracle Network. Our chapter has also recently collaborated with our advisors to create a professionalism capsule about how to deal with interviewing, email etiquette and much more. This came up when one of our executive board members saw girls sending her unprofessional emails she expressed this concern to the advisors and they decided to collaborate and create a capsule to teach girls about professionalism (the common goal). The capsule was very informative and the chapter enjoyed it. All in all sometimes collaboration can be hard but in the end the result is worth it.