There’s an old saying in television: “Never work with kids or animals”! And granted, we don’t work in television anymore but we certainly have not listened to that old adage – we love working with kids!
It’s never too early for young people to start focusing on how they work within a team and learning that no personality type is wrong, we’re just different. At school, just as much in life after school, we all need to learn that the world is made up of different ways of thinking, different ways of working and different methods of problem solving.
It’s how you deal in those situations with different personalities that makes the difference and is worth learning.
Unless you work entirely in a bubble, no job in the world will see you working 100% autonomously or without engagement with peers/colleagues. Likewise it would be foolish for a business to fill their workforce with all like-minded people. We need the variety of different personalities to make the cogs in a business turn. And so, as no one is immune to working with others lets figure out the best way to do it.
Remarkably, whenever we run our ‘education events’ I am constantly surprised at how adept students are at working together (maybe we become less tolerant of others with age and want everything done our way). We all know deep-down it doesn’t work like this but it doesn’t stop us from trying.
This is why we love getting out and reminding young people of the importance of acknowledging our differences, utilising our personalities and working patterns and using this to our best advantage when navigating a task to completion.
We create events that are goal-oriented team competitions. It is essential for students to work together to accomplish the task. And while at the end of the day of course we have an overall winner (and I’m yet to meet someone who doesn’t love that winning feeling) success is still gained by everyone just in taking on the task and finishing it.
Teaching a person how to deal with inter-personal professional relationships is a life-skill that will serve them no matter what life vocation they eventually choose.
It’s all about how we deal with each other and it’s never too early to learn to embrace difference instead of rejecting it.
