Doing All the Work in the Group Project

I had a friend who hated group projects. He was a straight-A student with a 4.0 GPA. He was recognized as the top student in all of his business school classes, as well as his graduating class in business school.

Naturally, you can see where this is going. Whenever his class was assigned a group project, he did all the work. No one else contributed, and everyone else just chilled, partied, and stayed out of the way while he worked tirelessly. The group would always get an A, exemplar commendations and feedback, but it was all his contributions. As a business school student, there were plenty of classmates who didn’t try and coasted their way through the program, especially if they had strong networking skills to get themselves a job. He felt like his classmates freeloaded on his hard work and commitment.

It wasn’t always this way, but I increasingly find myself in somewhat similar situations. Right now, I am a special education teacher during the day, and law student at night. I also try to balance freelance writing and marathon running on the side, too. Professionally, my job has become a bit more paperwork-oriented than in the past. Most of what I do now is conduct assessments, write reports, draft documents related to students’ individualized educational plans (IEPs), and communicate with parents and teachers to facilitate the success of high school students with disabilities.

Most of the time, I similarly find myself in professional situations where there are multiple people assigned to a project, and I do all or most of the work. As such, I feel like I’m pulling a lot more weight than others. However, even if I feel that way, I rarely say anything about it to be polite and nice about the situation. To react abrasively and push back in response to my personal feeling that I am outworking my peers and colleagues would breach some sort of unspoken code.

However, I also know who I am. I am neurotic when it comes to work and academic-related tasks. I can be obsessive and come off too strong when it comes to my professional and academic life, which is a big juxtaposition to my I can have poor work life balance and stray on the side of work when the stakes are high. I like to think I have very strong time management skills. My obsessiveness and hyperfixation certainly contributes to doing most or all the work.

At work, I work with people who are in their late 30s and 40s, maybe older, with kids and who aren’t willing to throw themselves into their work like I do given their more significant life commitments. They tend to appreciate me, just like I, too, may appreciate a young person in their 20s lightening my load when I have kids. Whenever someone tells me how stressed out they are, and how something at work is piling on to that stress, I try to do everything I can to alleviate the burden for them, no questions asked.

No one complains about this. In fact, they are more often than not grateful. There are cases where people want to take more of the responsibility and like to take most of the responsibility themselves. However, I find that more the case in my academic setting than in my quasi-corporate workplace. In high school and college, I worked with a lot of people who pushed me to do better. At work, however, I find myself in more situations where I take on the bulk of the work.

To be fair, I ask for this. When the work is not being done well enough or fast enough for my standards, I just do it, no questions asked. This can make me, sometimes, overburden myself because I don’t ask for help and have trouble delegating.

Of course, there are plenty of exceptions. In college, I did not pull my weight on physics group projects and experiments where I just didn’t get it and my labmates did. There were times earlier in high school and college when my more ambitious and go-getter classmates would contribute significantly more than me.

In an ideal world, there is group harmony where everyone contributes equally. And in all the settings I’ve been in where I’ve had to contribute to a group project, there are certain rules of etiquette that you don’t breach. If there is an unequal distribution of labor, you don’t tell the professor or boss about it. You address it with your group if there is any resentment — but more often than not, the fact that the work gets done and the result is good matters more than how it gets done.

I often have to make compromises to take on a greater share than I would like to have the work done my way.

For some, an equal distribution of work outweighs the quality of the project. It’s about the precedent — there is less stress when you only have to do your fair share and it violates a sense of justice for one person to do the whole thing. If you are willing to compromise on less control over the final process and trust your groupmates, then this is certainly the way to go. For me, this is most certainly the case with some lower-stakes projects.

But I think group projects say something about me more deeply and my personality type, and they could also be an indicate of personality types for everyone.

My neurotic obsessiveness over taking control of a project often comes when my name, and some sort of external motivator, like a grade or some sort of evaluation, also is at stake in said project. I suddenly lose the ability to just chill. I like to throw everything against the wall and see what sticks, and the only way I can be satisfied with myself is if I can give everything I have. Of course, it is unrealistic to give everything I have for everything I do, but this is my mentality when the stakes are at a certain level.

I will also admit there are vanity-related factors at play for the dreaded group project. There is an internal craving I have for someone to push me to do better. But there is something even more childish at stake.

When I was six to twelve years old, I loved to show the whole class how smart I was. In the 2000s, in both classes with a lot of other Asians and non-diverse classes with predominantly White peers, everyone thought Asians were smart and good at math. And so I didn’t want to be the odd man out or not fulfill the stereotype, and it certainly didn’t hurt that I was, also, naturally very good at math and learned multiplication and division much faster than my peers. I wouldn’t even say a lot of it was me being influenced by a stereotype — it was just who I was.

I would participate and go in front of the class to show the rest of the class how to solve a problem when asked. I’m sure I used to be very annoying about this tendency, too. I would be the “know it all” in social groups who loved to get on my peers’ nerves, treating every situation like it was the classroom. I just loved being right and showing people I was right. Until I was in middle school, when I started to have social anxiety and became more attuned to reading the room and other people’s feelings and emotions, I just would not get the cue of when I needed to (excuse my blunt language), shut the fuck up.

I am 27 years old now, significantly more mature, and empathetic. I am a bit of a people pleaser, so a huge part of my personality is that I want harmony for the whole group and for everyone to get along. Any time I am in any way responsible for hosting a social gathering, I really, really want everyone to get along and have a good time and am very attuned to cues when someone is not having a good time and try to go overboard in ameliorating that. I used to joke that this was “Asian hospitality” because it would be what my mother would do for my friends to make sure everyone had enough food to eat.

However, this childhood tendency to try to show off how smart and capable I am has, partially, extended itself into adulthood. It manifests itself in these professional and academic situations. For example, in law school, I spent my whole first year barely participating at all. The professor would ask the whole class what the answer to a question was. No one would say anything and there would be a 10–20-second long awkward silence. In other situations, the professor would call on me to answer a question for the class and I would be put on the spot and sometimes unprepared.

Law school is known for having the Socratic method of teaching, where the professor randomly calls on people to give their answers. This is known as “cold calling.” This puts students on the spot in front of the whole class, and if you didn’t do the reading, like I didn’t for most of last year, it’s a bit embarrassing when you get the question completely wrong. However, since my classmates and I are evening law students, the professors try to go easier on us and the vast majority have not cold called us, understanding that unlike day law school students, we are, more often than not, balancing jobs and families.

This year, however, I do all the readings and take copious notes. There are times I have participated 10 or more times per two to three-hour class. In law school, people who do this are pejoratively known as “gunners.” It is not a good label to have — it’s the person who stereotypically argues with the professor, poses hypothetical questions that have almost nothing to do with the subject matter, takes over the class, and sometimes talks more than the professor.

To be fair, I try to be tactful about this and don’t argue with the professor or ask super irrelevant hypothetical situations. When the professor asks the class a question, gets no response for 10–20 seconds, I then look around the class. When I see no one has raised their hand and that there’s a very awkward silence, I participate and raise my hand to try to bail the professor out. After all, I’m a teacher, too. I know how it feels to have super low engagement and like you’re doing something very wrong when your students are not engaged. It’s not the most ideal situation, but when you have one or two very excited students who love to participate, it’s very easy to over-rely on them and let them take over the class because at least there aren’t super awkward silences when you ask a question.

In the group project, yes, I will admit that there is a part of me that loves to just show off how smart and capable I am. I will admit that part of me does not care if other people are annoyed or talk about me behind my back. When someone says “yeah, Ryan just did the whole project,” it doesn’t make me resentful, but feeds my sense of pride and ego. As much as I hate to deny it, that ego and sense of how I see myself and where I should be in terms of achievement has propelled me to places I have never thought I would go.

I would not be going to law school at night while having a very draining, stressful (but rewarding) job during the day and trying to balance being a marathon runner and writer unless some part of me had this megalomanic hubris that constantly thinks “yeah, I’m the best,” and “nothing can stop me.” The competitiveness I have as an athlete naturally spills into my academic and professional life.

Like the law school label for someone who participates too much, I like to gun for the top. I always go for top marks, fast times, and the highest accolades. I always want to be the best, but this megalomanic ambition is balanced against a people-pleasing tendency to want everyone else to be happy and have a good time.

This naturally results in me defaulting to doing most or all of the work in a group project, no questions asked, not always because I feel like I have to, but because I want to. I test myself and keep giving myself more and more because not only do I want to see where my limit is, but I know that one of the best feelings out there is pushing yourself beyond what you thought you were capable of before.

I am not a mind reader, so I can’t say that every person who does all the work in a group project does so because they have the same kind of internal ego or mindset as me. Some people just want to be successful, or are super diligent and want something done sooner rather than later. Some just don’t mind being that person.

Others might do all the work in a group project out of obligation but be secretly resentful that other people did not contribute at all. I am not one of these people. I love being the one who steps up under pressure and responsibility. I am obsessive not because I’m a control freak (although there probably is a bit of that in me, too), but because of pride.

Depending on the person, someone like me is easy to work with or can be very difficult to work with. In situations where the workload is more equitable and we all have our fair share, I feel very strongly about pulling my weight. It’s important to note that the style of someone like me can actually be disempowering.

At work, if I do it all in terms of writing most reports and conducting every assessment, how are newer people supposed to learn to do it themselves? Am I really setting up my organization for success if I never taught anyone how to do what I do and if it’ll struggle significantly when I’m not there?

I recall reading a book from a pastor who had to take some time off from his church. He expected his church to struggle when he left and have a hard time — instead, the assistant pastor stepped up, and the church did just fine without him.

There’s also a part of me and people like me that want to feel important, essential, and irreplaceable. But the truth is, for the sustainable, long-term future of all parties, it’s better that we all contribute equally rather than one or two people doing all the work. That’s a pill that is especially tough for someone like me to swallow.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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