What is Collaboration?

Collaboration transcends aiding one another in achieving individual goals to working together to accomplish a mutual goal.  In working collaboratively responsibility, influence, and the group’s successes and failures are shared.  Without collaboration individuals can be marginalized, the creativeness of the group is limited; communication does not always happen effectively and on the whole the group cannot be as successful. 

The book defines competition as adversarial and can only result in one person succeeding.  I disagree with the text on this point and while competition does encourage labels of winning and losing there is a lot more to it than that.  It goes on to say that winning is “extrinsically” motivated; in this case I think that there is too much emphasis being put on the method and not enough on the individual.  For example, we have the Greek Awards every year and I would be willing to gamble that Beta will not be winning Chapter of the Year.  Now, does that mean that I won’t do my best to improve the chapter during the year and work at making it a better chapter than it currently is? Absolutely not, if anything the fact that Beta is not a “winner” should be motivation to get better.

I will admit that this is a very individualistic approach to looking at the issue; say for example instead of working towards being Chapter of the Year we worked to better the entire Greek Community and did so with other chapters.  Working collaboratively like this would give us better end results than everyone striving to be the best Chapter.  But at the same time, is it really realistic to imagine no one wants to be the best?  If FIJI, Beta, FarmHouse, Sammy, DTS, etc. all decided today that we would work only towards improving Ohio State; don’t you think we would still be competing with one another?  I would still want my Chapter to have better grades, to recruit better guys and to be the best.  If no other Chapter was on campus, I would still want the best and I’m sure every other Chapter President would say the same.  This is because our drive to succeed is internal; we put the pressure on ourselves to make our Chapter the best.