Team Building

This weekend I had the opportunity to go to a YM/YW retreat. It was for the presidencies of the youth in our ward. It was a really fun experience and quite spiritual, too. They had a million good points on how you can become a better person, but the one that was stessed the most was working as a team. So guess what? That's what I'm writing about!

First off, working as a team does NOT mean that you have to do everything together. Instead, you should look at teamwork as a bunch of people with a common goal. An example is during science, while you're doing a lab, notice how you can do things much more effectively and efficiently if you can delegate jobs. This way, you're not all doing the SAME thing at the SAME time. In a nutshell, you only need one person to do a small task, so if you have multiple people, you can do multiple tasks. Another example would be football, soccer, baseball or basketball. Everybody can't be holding onto the ball at the same time. On the other hand, sometimes there's a big task like lifting a giant box, which requires more than just one person in order to lift it. Then you work together.

At the retreat, I learned that the words, teamwork and delegate, build on each other. Teamwork means a cooperative or coordinated effort on the part of a group of persons acting together as a team or in the interests of a common cause or work done with a team. A great example would be construction, every worker's goal is to finish the house, but if they all worked alone, then they'd all be behind on their building timetables and nothing would get done. Delegate means to assign jobs to others to lighten the load. A really good example of delegating would be in baseball. You can't have everybody everywhere on the field, so the coach delegates the different bases and fielding positions.

So, if you think and ponder about these definitions, it leads you to the conclusion that in order to delegate, you need to work as a team. And in order to get things done effectively as a team, you NEED to learn how to delegate.