Weekly Wolf: Teamwork

Your writing prompt for the week

Over the past five or six days, I have been building a 10x12 foot garden shed in the northwest corner of our backyard. It’s big. There are many, many pieces…

And the instruction book is in two volumes, totaling around 120-some pages. I’ve had help from my husband and son…

And from our friend, David (not pictured), who for some reason volunteers himself for large and complicated projects without being asked. That’s a good kind of friend to have.

As of this morning, this is where we stand on the project, as seen from my office where I’m writing this:

There’s still much to do. Lay down the deck board for the roof, add the windows and the door and the gable vents, and all of the trim pieces. Not to mention the shingling, a job I’m hiring out to a roofer who gave me an extremely reasonable quote.

Big jobs require teamwork. Teamwork requires at least two people, sometimes more, to work together toward a common goal. Sometimes people work really well together and they are a well-oiled machine, getting the job done quickly and efficiently and with excellence. Sometimes…not so much. And there is all sorts of in-between.

When I work with my husband on the shed, we have a different dynamic than when I work with my son. When I work with our friend, David, it’s another dynamic. When my husband and David work together, that dynamic is also unique. Because everyone has different styles of working, different personalities, different levels of authority.

When it comes to the shed, I’m the foreman, because it’s my shed, my project, my baby. Before the men make decisions on things where there is a question, they run it by me to get approval. But my husband has more experience constructing things because he often helped his engineer father build stuff, so I often defer to him.

When he and David work together, their styles are completely different. My husband is a planner. A measure-thrice kind of guy. A we-need-to-drill-a-pilot-hole kind of guy. A slow-down-and-let’s-think-about-this kind of guy. (Remember, his dad was an engineer.) He’s also someone who misplaces his tools a lot because the object permanence part of his brain is less developed than the planning part of his brain.

David, on the other hand, is a let’s-get-this-part-done-and-check-it-off-the-list kind of guy. A this-is-probably-fine kind of guy. An it-will-all-work-out-in-the-end kind of guy. He’s let’s-look-at-the-big-picture and my husband is the-devil’s-in-the-details. I fall somewhere in between those two philosophies. But we can all get the job done and still be friends afterward, even if we might be irritating the others a little bit during the work.

All of us who are contributing to the project of building the shed have a good work ethic and have been taught how to treat other people. We can get along and get the job done because that’s what adults should be able to do. But not everyone has that attitude. And a story involving teamwork needs conflict in order to be an interesting story. So let’s dive into some scenarios that involve teamwork and conflict for this week’s prompt…