Cooperative and Competitive

00:06 Cooperative and competitive. Students can relate to that. As a teacher, I always try to encourage students to be cooperative with each other. Still had thinking in terms of being a part of a team even as a student because we are going to work for the rest of our professional lives in teams. Even if you have your specific job, at some point you do have to collaborate with people so that's what the cooperative space is; collaboration, encouraging others, and family.

00:37 Sometimes people get offended when we talk about family in terms of the people we work with but we have to think of it from a different perspective. You kind are a family, a certain type of family. Right? We have relationships. We need to support each other for it to be a positive working relationship. So if you think about it, not thinking about the traditional sense of what a family is, but I want to get along with my family, I want to support my family in every way that I can. Will there be some dysfunction? Absolutely. But if I apply some of these cultural values, principles, and cultural intelligence, then I can create a cohesive environment. Competitive. So when we think about that, sometimes that's okay but when competitiveness starts to interrupt our ability to collaborate intelligently, then it's a problem so we don't want to step on other people to get ahead. Right? We could be competitive in terms of getting our work done and finish meeting deadlines. That's all good and great. But when we become opportunistic in a way that we step on other people to get ahead, then that's not okay. Competitive does mean being assertive and that's always okay. Right? We want to get work done but we want to do it in the collaborative kind of way. And when we focus on accomplishments, we don't want it to be just about us, we want everybody on the team to be able to be successful and then it makes the organization successful. And in terms of healthcare and academia, that's what keeps people coming back. Right? Keeping the organization functioning.