Having a good attitude is a quality that is constantly mentioned to underclassmen early and often throughout the Tabor School of Business program. Monitoring your attitude along with its impact on your co-workers and work performance is an imperative step toward achieving your greatest potential in business. In a Huffington Post article about attitude for business success, Alex Pirouz compared controlling your attitude in a business climate like being on a rollercoaster ride, it has plenty of ups and downs. “The power of choice is something we all have control of and it us up to us to use positive reinforcement to our advantage in a business climate (Pirouz).” Attitude can dramatically shift the way a business operates. Maintaining a positive attitude will be infectious to employees, thus having an effect on the customers and maximizing your own business performance. Success can be a driving factor to owning a business. It goes deeper than materialistic achievements; essentially, it should be about delivering the quality and values of the business through your positive attitude and actions.
Understanding how to control individual attitude is a constant journey and adding team members can sometimes make it difficult. Mixing attitude with team dynamics is exactly what underclassmen in Tabor School of Business are being challenged with. 
In the class BU 111 Team Dynamics, we are taught how to function in a team setting for a team project. In Team Dynamics you work on team building projects and personal reflections. The team building projects display how you work on a team, while the personal reflections give you a way to step back and see how you act under stressful circumstances. The result of Team Dynamics is not only a better understanding of how to work within a team but how you perceive yourself in a team environment.
BU 111 is taken simultaneously with BU 100 Business Creation, a class where you learn all of the various functions of a business, like marketing and finance, and it allows you to use the skills being learned in the Team Dynamics class.
During BU 100, you are randomly paired into teams and tasked to put together a business plan. Most teams are compiled with people from different majors, backgrounds, and genders so it can be difficult at times to keep a positive attitude when things get tough. In BU 111, students specifically work on this common problem by building up their team’s morale. We do this by completing assessments and team building challenges over the course of a few weeks. One team building challenge example would be keeping a positive attitude during the marshmallow challenge.
This is a common exercise to test a team’s communication and leadership skills. Each team is given uncooked spaghetti noodles, a small piece of rope, and a roll of tape to try and elevate the marshmallow to the highest height out of all the other teams. The biggest challenge is keeping a good attitude when your attempts to get the marshmallow to stay on top fall short of being successful, but it can also be difficult to work as a team when multiple people have different strategies. This is a great exercise to work on and improve skills that can later be applied in the workplace.
Taking both BU 111 Team Dynamics and BU 100 Business Creation starts the development of a business professional. These classes show you how you should correctly apply all business facets to a real business. You learn how to function as a group under very stressful situations, you learn how to adapt to changing business scenarios, and you learn how to succeed in an ever-changing business world.
As a business student, we are grateful for the end result after taking the combination of these two courses. Both are great introductions to assignments you will work on over the next four years, specifically teaching you how to work in teams efficiently and effectively. Your attitude can determine the results of these types of projects, so staying focused on the main goal and having a great attitude can make any team succeed.
Pirouz, Alex. “The Importance of Attitude for Business Success.” The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 10 Aug. 2015. Web. 23 Apr. 2017. <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alex-pirouz/the-importance-of-attitude-for-business-success_b_7958636.html>.