Playing as a Team

3rd August, 2008

Team player…….this word is often heard, said and practiced by students who are going to attend placement. They get guidance from seniors about how to be, better to say how to act as a team player! They even have a round called group dynamics in their interview selection. Every social animal is itself a best example to be a team player. My choice is ant, which looks as an ordinary species and very tiny, despite its appearance and vulnerability, it is one of the largest population on earth. All the credit goes to its team playing ability. So what can us infer from ants about team playing?

Every body in the team has a special ability, so no one is useless. Everybody in the team has to co-ordinate with other and adapts themselves to the situation. Optimized usage of resources is required with efficient time management. Better communication is an essential ingredient for humans like us. Most of all, ego must be avoided, no single person is a team leader, it is a well defined democratic set up with one or two representatives for the team.


Most suitable proverb is “Birds of a feather flock together”. Let me quote the incident where I got exposure to team playing, learnt and felt it. A group of six to eight boys including myself were staying back in the college hostel even after the exams for fourth semester got over. Reason we had got arrear in a paper of third semester, “Digital Design and Principles”. It was a black patch of our life, we felt as rusted particles of iron floating in the air. We were not able to face the truth and afraid whether we would clear the paper this time. One of our seniors was also staying back as he had an arrear to clear. The most frightening part of it was, he lost his placement in L&T due to it. We had nightmares haunting us in night and shame tagged to us in the morning. We sat together, came to conclusion that we would split the units among ourselves, learn it and teach it to others. Thus we can learn in depth, devout more time and encourage one another. The ones who couldn’t do it by themselves learnt from us and helped us in checking whether we grasped the contents properly. Hence as a team we struggled our way towards success. The D-Day came and we all, as a birds of a feather flocked together with flying colors!


Tipped by,
Kanagasabai S