Before every issue, The LBFP Link asks alumnae to provide their own personal thoughts related to a particular topic. This issue’s “Question of the Quarter” is—

Describe a success you’ve achieved as a member of a team. What do you find particularly good, and/or particularly hard, about working with others, as opposed to on your own? What one piece of advice would you give about professional collaboration?

Pakiza Abdulrahman in Morocco for last year's LBFP alumnae conference.

Pakiza Abdulrahman (BIP 2005, Bahrain)
Working as a member of a team can be very rewarding for the individual as well as the organization.

I’ll talk about this in relation to a personal experience that I have been through lately while organizing the “Food Fair” (a fundraising event for disabled youth). Being the Vice President of the New Dawn Ladies Society, the President and I thought of a way to empower the ladies to work together in a very collaborative way.

We arranged five teams to manage various organizational aspects of the event, without regard to the individual members’ titles and roles. This way, any success or failure would be shared among the team members with no one person to praise or blame.

The event was a huge success. We raised a very large amount of money, beyond our expectations. And this was achieved because of the teams’ hard work and dedication to achievement.

We did have some issues and pitfalls in organizing teams and actually convincing them to work together. Some issues are—

• In every team, there will be some bystanders. Some people who will not be in the “mood” to give since everyone else is doing the job.
  
  
• You will find some people relaxing simply because working in a team is not part of their performance plan. They are getting their salary at th­e end of the month regardless of working in a team or not.
  
  
• Some individuals get easily offended when working in a team, even though they are extremely hard-working individuals. They simply prefer working alone.

Reward, motivation, and benefits...are vital success factors for achieving good results from teamwork.