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.

The following were my results for the Learning About Yourself exercises:

1. How Machiavellian Are You? 22/50 (low – below 30)
2. Are You a High Self-Monitor? 42/65 (low – below 53)
3. What’s Your EI At Work? 73/100 (low – below 84)
4. Narcissism Test  19/40 (high – above 17)

The results showed that I am below average for Machiavellianism. This may reflect that I am an honest worker in groups, but would be less capable of being able to influence others to see things my way. I was not a high self-monitor, but my score was not too low either. This shows that although I am not completely focused on controlling emotions, which can cause stress and superficial relationships, I can also control my emotions to a degree, allowing myself to maintain a professional demeanour. I scored high in emotional intelligence, demonstrating that in the workplace, I would be able to maintain positive work relationships due to having a good understanding of how others feel. Emotional intelligence would help in the realm of managing people and understanding the needs of others in order to make better management decisions for a team. On the test for narcissism, my score was high, because of my tendency towards high-achieving leadership positions. This often causes me to pursue leadership roles in group work, and to have high expectations in group projects. However, I will have to be aware of the ability of others to contribute and give others the opportunity to lead as well. Combined with my high emotional intelligence score, I believe that these traits will balance out to allow me to be a leader while also understanding the feelings and needs of other team members.