What constitutes your team?
TELL ME, who is in your work team? For many people, `work team' would include colleagues who are working on the same project, those who belong to the same department, and perhaps those who report to the same boss. But in reality, most of us spend a major part of our time interacting, instructing, communicating and following up with people from other departments, rather than with those in our own. We are dependent on their efficient functioning as much as they are on ours. Here is a simple exercise that shows how complex and interdependent our jobs can be.
Take a sheet of paper and draw a circle in the centre. Enter your name and designation in the circle.
Add circles around your circle containing the people, departments or areas you deal with for executing your job.
If you receive things (instructions, materials, information, paperwork and so on) from any of these people or departments in the circles around you, draw an arrow with the tip pointing towards your circle. If you give things (instructions, materials, information, paperwork and so on) to the people or departments in the surrounding circles, draw an arrow with the tip towards that person/ department.
Highlight the more important functions and relationships with bolder lines.
Even the simplest and most straightforward of jobs have 10-20 functions that are dependent on work/people concerned with other departments. When put down on paper, most of us find that our jobs are far more complex than we first thought.
Some key learning points:
We are dependent on a large number of people for the efficient execution of our job and they are equally dependent on us. They cannot do their jobs properly unless we do ours well and vice-versa. There are a number of people we ought to know well. They are important to our work lives. The better we understand them and work with them, the better we can do our jobs. Organisations comprise several such interdependent job constellations, each with its own miniature solar system.
Most jobs are complex. All firms and organisations too are very complex. Most systems in companies are not infallible; on the contrary, they are often messy and complicated.
Good employees learn how to cope with the mess and think ahead.
Good team members don't blame the system. Instead, they think about the result of their actions; they take responsibility for the efficient execution of their role/ function in the system.
Every organisational chain is as strong as its weakest link. Even if one of the links breaks down somewhere in the system, problems arise all over. When other people have problems, we could be responsible for their plight - either directly or indirectly. Problems are normal. Mistakes are all right as long as we learn from them.
The greater the risk of something going wrong, the more careful we need to be and make sure we understand the task, show more responsibility and extend better co-operation.
Our colleagues should be on our side. We should be on theirs. Success comes from helping each other. We make, after all, our work team!
BS
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