Life lesson: Teamwork really means pulling together

Little did I know how much influence a little red sticker would have on my first year of study for an MBA.

And even less did I realize that sticker was about to teach me one of my first lessons in business school: You rarely, if ever, get to choose the team that you work with.

"Keep this on your name tag and don't forget it," admonished the second-year MBA student who handed me that sticker on first-day registration, on which she had taken a magic marker and scrawled "A5." I looked up at her with confusion.

"You'll see in a bit," the student volunteer added.

Turns out that she, with marker and strip of circular stickers in hand, had been given the task of randomly selecting my project group -- the group I would work with all semester in my main management class.

Toward the end of our first lecture on that first day, the professor for that class sent us into small classrooms to meet the people who had been assigned the same sticker code.

They would be, as a recent MBA grad described to me, my new family.

At York University's business program, as at other MBA schools, students are immediately put into teams.

These are the groups they will have to work with on everything from sharing notes to class presentations to writing huge projects.

There is no changing of groups. If the team can't work together, it can go for mediation with a professor, but no switching is allowed.

The message is clear: If members can't work together, they risk failing the course. If they fail, they will have to redo the course.

At roughly $2,000 a credit, I don't have that kind of money to burn nor the time during the summer to sit through a makeup class. Failure is not an option.

With that much on the line, I can understand how some students are upset with the random group assignments. There's buzz among us newbies that some teams were fighting on the first day and that morale was already low.

I guess I lucked out. My group -- consisting of a Canadian-born, U.S Ivy League school economics grad who played competitive hockey during his studies, along with a Canadian software programmer, a Greek mechanical engineer and a Chinese real-estate marketer who moved to Toronto only a few weeks ago from Shanghai -- clicked from the get-go.

Moments after shaking hands, we were talking about our goals and how best to leverage our individual strengths in the group environment.

The consensus in our group was that having the choice of who would be on our team taken away from us will prepare us for the working world, where the stakes are far higher than not obtaining a credit.

In a corporate environment, managers regularly pull together different people with different skills to work on a project or run a department.

If team members can't work together effectively, they might not meet sales goals, might lose that multimillion-dollar contract or even worse, their jobs.

That's why the first few days of the MBA program were spent on team-building exercises that stressed co-operation, communication and success:

Our entire team had to balance on a tiny block of wood and then swing on a rope, suspended from a tree, to get each member to another tiny block a few feet away. If someone touched the ground, we had to start over.

In 30 minutes, we had to build half of a suspension bridge, using a mish-mash of pipe cleaners, elastic bands, Popsicle sticks and paperclips. That half was then attached to another team's half. The combined bridge had to balance a six-pack of bottled water. If it didn't, we failed the task.

We had to write a team contract that clearly detailed the group's goals and rules of conduct for the semester.

We had to come up with a team name (which took a lot more team work than it may seem to have required).

While I had completed similar exercises in previous jobs, I was still surprised by how my team's performance improved after each task.

During that rope-swinging exercise, for example, more than one person had a strategy for taking the group from block to block. All those ideas led to confusion and frustration.

So, we had each person explain their plan, voted on the best idea and swung to success -- not once touching the ground.

As soon as the clock started for the bridge-building task, we each started scrambling to assemble parts of the apparatus. But then, thanks to the leadership of our mechanical engineer, we realized we'd be smarter to spend the first 10 minutes examining our materials, brainstorming ideas, drawing a blueprint and divvying up sections of the bridge for each member to build. A half-hour later, the six-pack of water wobbled slightly, but balanced perfectly.

We may have known each other only for a few days but already we were trusting each other to make important decisions. Leaders were emerging on each task. And we were communicating and critiquing each other like we had worked together for decades.

Nobody was shy about voicing an opinion. Each of us quickly realized that if something wasn't working well, we had to figure out right away what was going wrong and come up with a plan to make it right.

As one of my teammates noted after the team-building seminars, overcoming obstacles is a key building block of success -- which is why companies spend tons of money every year on exercises and retreats similar to the ones we had just completed.

Fingers crossed that our success will continue past week one.

Richard Bloom is a former Report on Business writer who has enrolled in York University's Schulich School of Business to obtain an MBA. He will write regularly on the career lessons he is taking away from the classroom.