Teamwork.

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It's important. It's expected. For some things it's even essential. So I try. I want other people involved in what I'm doing. I want it to be "us" and not "me". And I still end up walking all over them and ignoring their suggestions. I simply miss them: they aren't *my* ideas after all!

Sooner or later, I'll have the group of one that I've really set out to create. And the whole endeavor will be pointless.

It's frustrating.

[/rant]

It's either that or I avoid not to be so pushy or overbearing to the point that people will complain that I'm not contributing enough!

It's a biotch, aint it? You just cant please people.

Is this a work situation, academic, personal?

If it's academic: I always ask to work alone and the teacher usually understands. Group work is... in my top 3 of most unnecessary things.

My idea of teamwork is that we divvy up the task, split up, complete task, then meet up to create finished task. Apparently I'm wrong. It seems that teamwork is everybody doing the same thing together, loudly. How anybody can accomplish anything that way is beyond me.

Amen.

it's more or less both, depending on what needs to be done... some things, like brainstorming, design and concepts are best done together with each member doing something to help form the final product. Other things like programming, writing etc. can be split up and given to the person with the most competence in their respective fields. Say someone is good at observing people's behaviour and advertizing. It would be prudent that the person would then make up some marketing concepts. Someone else, competent in programming could do a general design of a program (UML), while yet another person could help with other aspects of progrmming that the first is not that good at.

take my latest CS project for example, a tile engine made in XNA. I was in a team of 3 including myself. Now, i'm more or less the code monkey of the group, excelling at writing code, but not good at doing the general design, that would be a task best delegated to another group member, while giving my own input to the overall design of the program. The last group member did most of our marketing report as well as some coding.
The thing is, that we sorted up the work according to our competences (me doing bulk coding, graphics and writing the coding part of the report, 1st teammate doing UML design, animation coding and some report writing in his field, and the 2nd teammate doing marketing reports and some additional coding.
This was combined with your notion of doing a single task together loudly. In some parts of the process you need to bounce ideas off of your teammates, like brainstorming and some coding problems, making sure that others understand your idea and seeing it as a part of the bigger picture.

though the fact is, some people don't know or want to work in teams and are generally just jerks about it, deliberately taking control and throwing all your ideas in the bin... I often got a guy like this on my team in college, literally picking every single one of my ideas apart because of some incredibly small detail (what we call "myreknepperi", which translates to "ant f***ing") that doesn't even have an influence on the final product in the context of the assignment.
Some people even don't understand the simple concept of brainstorming, which is: "no idea is stupid."
I would go ahead and say that brainstorming is the most goddamn important aspect of any sort of teamwork. Working together with someone who doesn't understand the concept just feels like doing jailbird jobs in the harshest police state on the planet.

just my 2 cents on the subject