Every job I have ever had has been a valuable learning experience for me. I am lucky to have had only one experience that was remarkably unsuccessful, yet it taught me a lot about the difference between a productive and unproductive work environment. This was in my grade 10 year: I had enrolled in a program called Junior Achievement which would allow a group of students to come together and create their own business venture that would operate for a year. Our company decided to make water bottles, and I was a sales manager. Here are three reasons why it was a poor working environment:

1.Lack of collaboration

From the very beginning, the team had failed to collaborate while creating the business idea. Without even discussing the possibilities, my group had voted to sell water bottles. I am sure we could have come up with something much more creative, but we did not even take the time to discuss other possibilities. From then on, we were simply split off into our different departments, with each department making its own decisions without consulting the others. This resulted in much confusion, dissatisfaction with results, and different visions of what we all wanted our business to do.

2.Apathetic management team

Our management team consisted of grade 12 students who were only there to gain credit to put on their university resumes. They did not put effort into the venture, failed to communicate with the rest of the team, and were not open to any new ideas. Their poor collaboration skills and lack of care led to the rest of the team feeling disconnected from the project. Most meetings were spent with team members doing their school homework, eating, or discussing unrelated topics. The management team’s attitudes had a severely negative impact on the entire team’s focus, which really took away from our potential.

3.Disorganized meetings and roles

Our company meetings never had any specific agenda or focus, and there was no timeline of the tasks to be completed. Most team members were not even given any tasks to complete at all. As a whole, nobody in the company was quite sure of what they needed to do, leading to an extreme lack of focus towards the end goal because we simply did not have any idea of how we would achieve it.