Such a good discussion...

I've really enjoyed this discussion so much. The collective breadth of your experiences as collaborators really is extraordinary, and Lee's post reminded me of how much we still need that knowledge and practice of collaboration in so many professional contexts. Don't forget to accentuate your considerable capabilities in this area in your resumes and in any interviews, letters of application, etc. in the upcoming months.

I had no experience at all of group work when I was a student (either as an under grad. or a graduate student) and the expectation that I would work in groups, or teams, was a real shock to me when I finallly hit the workplace. But I was working in a field -TV - where an individual simply couldn't work alone, and I was finally converted to group work, despite the rows, the disagreements, the fact that working with four or five people at different stages of the project made everything seem to take so much longer, because it was easy to recognize that alone I couldn't have produced an end product of such complexity and imagination and quality. Sometimes only the memory of those past successes was the sole factor that kept me hanging on in a painful, inefficient, or "we never got past storming to norming" collaborations, and I do wish that I had known then as much as you do now about how to negotiate conflict, address issues of leadership, assume responsibility, motivate others, and so on. But I like the fact that I can still keep learning more about collaboration from discussions such as these, and maybe you can all infuse soem of the same exchanges into your professional roles?

Looking forward very much to your next competency essays on this theme....