The Road Not Taken: Mastering The Art Of The 'Group Project' While Working In-House

Group projects at work aren’t often called “group projects” -- they are called “doing your job.”

Teamwork always wins the dayGroup projects. Who doesn’t love them? That is, of course, a rhetorical question. Everyone hates group projects. It never fails that you end up carrying the weight for your teammates because you care the most about the outcome. You do the work, they get the benefits of your labor. We are trained from an early age to abhor group projects. Watch any competitive reality show and when the group challenge is announced, the participants vocalize our feelings about working with others through their own groans and complaints about the inevitable elimination to come. Our instinct is to believe that we are more at risk when we are forced to work with others.

Perhaps more so than at a law firm, in-house lawyers work collaboratively, both internally within the legal department and with other groups. The dynamics of group projects don’t go away in a professional setting, but I’ve found they can be better regulated than the one-sided group projects from school.

Group projects at work aren’t often called “group projects” — they are called “doing your job.” Unlike school projects, colleagues participating in work group projects often have an incentive to participate, whether it is a stake in the outcome of the project, independent evaluation on individual contributions, or simply establishing or improving one’s reputation as a team player within the organization.

Sometimes though, if you are very lucky, you get colleagues who are as invested in a strong outcome as you are. If you are even luckier, these colleagues are professionals skilled at their jobs with an interest in improving anything they are working on, including the collaborative work they do. This experience is what makes in-house work interesting. When you work with professionals with different skill sets as peers, as opposed to experts or ancillary team members, you get to accomplish something more than what you could accomplish on your own. In fact, when everything goes well, your own job becomes easier.

It took me a while to re-learn my instincts when it came to working in groups. For many years after going in-house, I did not believe that my colleagues could or would do their share. I also had the resentment and insecurity that many reality-show contestants have: I was skeptical of my colleagues’ ability and suspicious of their desire to actually do their job. I admit, I misjudged many of my colleagues and deprived myself of the benefits of their knowledge.

I am wiser now and can see how lucky I am to get to work with talented people of diverse professional backgrounds. Recently, I got to participate in a group effort with colleagues who were both invested in the successful outcome of our project. They were prepared, enthusiastic, and willing to do the work to pull along other colleagues who weren’t as far along (that would have been me). I learned so much from these colleagues, both in the context of subject-matter understanding and about how our organization has historically operated and performed. I would have never had the opportunity or ability to learn these partly technical- and partly tribal-knowledge lessons on my own. Only through my participation in the group effort did both the issue and the resolution arise, and I could be there to witness the apex and denouement instead of seeing the obstructed view of an issue I normally get when working alone.

My colleagues weren’t great team members because they are good people (they are, but that wasn’t the underlying reason they were such good team members), rather they are good at their jobs. They know their full participation will result in a better outcome for them, for the company, and for our customer. This kind of group effort was exciting, educational, and invigorating for me. When we finished the project, I knew I could have never achieved such spectacular results on my own.

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Celeste Harrison Forst has practiced in small and mid-sized firms and is now in-house at a large manufacturing and technology company where she receives daily hugs from her colleagues. You can reach Celeste directly at C.harrisonforst@gmail.com.

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