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At Diplomatic Enterprises, LLC, we look at ourselves as more than just a company but as a team of professionals working towards common goals. As a team, we understand the important concept of teamwork because it is required to accomplish our clients’ objectives. Consequently, we’ve decided to share some of our core teamwork values in this week’s blog post.
It’s hard to accomplish a task when someone is breathing down your neck every 5 minutes asking where the report, memo, brief, financials, coffee, or lunch is. If you hire someone to do a job, give them the space, time and opportunity to do it. Trust the people on your team to do the job they’ve been hired to do. Giving your team space to be successful also means giving them room to make mistakes, correct them and still get the job done.
No one cares that you graduated top of your class from [insert Top 100 school] or received your professional/post-graduate/doctorate degree from [insert Ivy League school]. The only people that care are you, your parents and the other terrible people that think it’s an indicator of success. Degrees, and to some extent, where they come from, don’t equal intelligence or competence. Instead of placing individuals around you that boost your self-esteem because their 6th grade math grades fall well shy of your impressive marks, seek to build a team that is comprised of the best that you can get in their field.
Diversity is not about filling quotas for dark faces and women in the work place. Diversity is about the mixture of ideas in the room, on a case, project, or policy because the people working on it don’t all share the same background and consequently have differing opinions. Many of the recent “PR Flubs” (for example, NFL) are partially a result of a lack of diversity in key areas of leadership. More women, millennials and people of color, would have likely led to a different way of handling the NFL’s most recent troubles. Advocating for diversity doesn’t mean lowering standards or quality; it simply means widening the lens to include often unseen and unheard opinions. Furthermore, the collective intelligence will lead to a more robust work environment and a better work product.
Building trust starts with getting to know more about your co-workers than their usual Starbucks order or food allergies (which is REALLY important). There’s a fine line between getting to know your team/co-workers and being the workplace stalker. Don’t endeavor to know enough to write a biography, but do seek to know more than the information you can get from their LinkedIn profiles. Once you’re able to learn more about them, what makes them who they are and why they operate the way that they do, and vice versa, it’s easier to work together because you’re not dodging invisible landmines that exist when you have no idea who you’re really working with.
There’s nothing more infuriating than working on a collaborative project and not having all of the pertinent information. No, Jim in IT doesn’t need to explain how the internet works, but if Jim is on the project he should at least tell you how it works as it relates to your project and why it’s critical to the project’s success. Deadlines, progress marks, departmental and overall goals are also important to share as they help with accountability and lets each team member know that they are valued contributors.
Whether you’re the President, CEO, Supervisor, Manager, or Project Lead, if you’re in a position of power, it’s important that your employees see you live up to the standards and principles you espouse. For example, don’t make rules against stealing people’s lunch out of the break room fridge, then the moment you forget your lunch steal someone’s leftover lasagna. Not cool; not cool at all. While rules may differ by department and vary based on management level, there are some that should be universal throughout the entire company, some of which include:
If you get caught breaking some of the common rules, it’s hard to, in good conscious, and without being privately ridiculed, hold the rest of the team accountable.
In conclusion, collaborative projects are much harder than they look on television and slightly easier than the ones we were forced to engage in during grade school. The key: observing the rules we espoused above, effective communication and sharing this blog post with as many people as possible…for research purposes of course. For more helpful blog posts and information on how you can join our team visit us at www.diplomaticenterprises.com, Follow us on Twitter at @DiplomaticEnt and Like our Facebook Page Diplomatic Enterprises, LLC.
