I
have had the blessing to spend my career working with talented
people. We created great solutions pushing the frontier with
emerging tools, techniques, and standards. My experiences have shown
me how good teams are composed. This boils down to valued people
with valued purpose.
Valued people are recognized and utilized for their expertise, strengths, and passions. These characteristics need to be discovered and listening is a good way to do it. Empowerment and trust need to follow; meaning, let the expert or experts in the case of hierarchy solve the problem. This acknowledges and confirms their value; otherwise, you are doing their job for them and they aren’t really needed or at least that is how they may feel.
Purpose
can be tricky to define, in my own experience it has often been only
a small component of the company’s outer lying mission.
Personally, I have latched on to the purpose of “solving the
puzzle” or problem. It motivates me, it keeps me up at night, it
wakes me in the morning, and it is a celebration when it is solved.
When a co-worker, team, boss, client, friend, wife, and so forth
celebrate with me, I keep coming back for more.
So,
what drives you? What expertise do you have that I should entrust or
learn from? What strengths do you have that I am lacking? What
passions do you have that will lead you to make better decisions than
me and in which areas? Knowing all of this, am I doing your job?
Are you doing mine? Questions like these need to be asked regularly,
pondered, and followed with action. Otherwise, we are pretending to
be a team when we are really a collection of competitors resulting in
mere reflections of great solutions.