Great Teams Part II

I neglected to introduce myself. My name is Alex Dail and I spent numerous years informally studying success and three years in graduate school learning what makes individuals and teams successful. Over the past 25 years I have put these principles to use. I helped many people become successful or more successful in their various endeavors. It is what I enjoy doing.

In my last post I told a story of how I enrolled in a course that was supposed to teach us how to work well together. The class failed to learn anything for the first half of the quarter mainly because we were not given any direction. I mentioned how both groups taking the class were used to being told what to do and when to do it. Personal initiative was not encouraged.

Along the same line I recently read a book about survivors. These are not average survivors, but people who ought to have died or failed. They beat the odds one of the main reasons they did is they wanted to – their mission was to survive. Their drive to overcome the odds centered on what I wrote on yesterday. They envisioned what they still wanted to do in life, and they valued something, often family, enough to preserver despite the fact that they were enduring extreme discomfort. It is important not to underestimate the power of providing a vision and touching on values that are important to people when assigning them a project. It can help them preserver even when the task itself is distasteful. A caveat is the vision given to them must be real. If it is a half-truth, out right lie, or a pie in the sky promise it will do two things you just don’t want. It will suck the life out of them. It will destroy trust. Give them a realistic vision that causes them to stretch that is in line with their values and they will attack the project with drive and desire.

On the subject of values I know a person who believes that if she values something it must be a shared value. This is not so; nor is it so that when I share a value it negates another value. Similarly, even though I value something like creativity I may not value it to the same extent she does. This is especially true if it competes with another one of my values like order. She has not learned that values are very subjective.

Speaking of subject and values, I learned a lesson too. How we defines words are subjective, and values are words. I know of a person who does not value money, except that he feels secure when he has a growing sum in the bank. However, he is generous towards others and leans towards frugal on spending. Another person professes also to not value money. However what this person means is that money is no object in obtaining wants. You can see how this effect can be seen in how all kinds of words and agreements we have in people and create misunderstandings.

I am sure you caught on by now what I have been writing about is creating meaning. People need to feel that what they are doing has meaning to them, to the business, and even better to society in the future.