Today, I would like to share "Teamwork Ability" under "Social Skills".
TEAM CAPABILITIES, creating a teamwork effect and striving to achieve common goals. Once people have this ability, they can: • Demonstrate team characteristics such as respect, mutual assistance and cooperation. /•Unite team members and actively and enthusiastically participate in the work together. • Build a sense of team identity, develop team spirit and responsibility. /• Protect the team and its reputation and share the honor.
Working in a cooperative team is a rare peak experience, which has nothing to do with money or anything else, it is a strong emotional experience that cannot be forgotten and addictive.
This also explains why there are many reluctant farewells after college military training, after orientation, and when college graduates disband.
The author, a friend who manages a team of software engineers in Silicon Valley, once said, "Anyone on our team, as long as someone calls him, can find a job that is $200,000 more than the current annual salary, but they don't choose to leave and get another high." ”
Why? Here, people work happily.
Managers make everyone on the team love their job, which is an ability. This ability is key to the art of assembling and leading teams. Someone has studied the best performing teams and found that most of the core members of the team are willing to work in this group. They have a sense of team accomplishment, they work together, have a solid intimacy, and have full trust in each other's abilities, so they have this sense of team accomplishment.
For everyone, emotional intelligence is the key to being a great talent. The same is true for a team and a group. So what separates the best-performing teams from those who do the same work but perform average?
Please refer to my previous article: Building a "Dream Team", we will be able to do everything | "Five Barriers to Teamwork", which summarizes the five characteristics of effective teamwork.
Getting a team to work together is already a very important ability in itself. At least one member of every well-functioning team has this ability.
Richard Price, a psychologist at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research, calls the people on his team who are good at organizing and coordinating and working in teams "health communicators" (HEPs). Price said: "These people are very important. This is not to say that everyone on the team needs to be a communicative and emotional leader, but as long as there is one such person in the team, the overall team will be more productive by 10 times. ”
The engineering team at General Data is a legendary team. The engineering team has two "health communicators," one of whom is Carl Alsing.
He is the second in command of the team, everyone trusts him, and he is also the emotional pillar of everyone. Before studying electrical engineering, he wanted to be a psychologist. Now, he's a consultant on the team, and everyone is happy to talk to him.
Another "health communicator" on the team is secretary Rosemarie Seale, who acts a bit like a landlord's aunt. She knows what kind of care everyone needs, helps people solve daily problems such as losing their paychecks, and is responsible for helping new team members familiarize themselves with the environment. While this kind of trivial work may seem inconspicuous, it is so important that team members feel loved, supported, and cared for.
Therefore, although the technology has developed to a certain extent, there is no need for a secretary, but there are still people who think that the secretary is indispensable, which is the reason.
"Soldiers do not move without generals, and snakes do not move without heads." It is very important for a team to have a highly capable team leader. The appointed leader should make everyone in the team admit that they are doing things fairly, truly care about the team members, and protect everyone's interests in the company. For example, when employees are attacked by gossip and their reputations are damaged, good managers step forward to protect employees, even providing them with the necessary human resources, or giving them specific support in terms of time.
A good team leader can make every member have a collective sense of mission, let everyone accept the team's work goals, and agree on the work schedule. Perhaps the most important quality of a team leader is persuasion, and such a leader can clearly explain the development prospects and goals of the team to provide impetus for the team to move forward. A charismatic leader can lift everyone's spirits when the team suffers setbacks.
In addition to influencing the main atmosphere of the team, the team leader also plays a coordinating role, coordinating everyone to cooperate and reach consensus. If no one takes the lead when everyone gathers, but they want to solve difficult problems together, someone needs to take the initiative to stand up and coordinate everyone's work and turn everyone into a team, so that they can complete the work together and achieve results. If the team is leaderless and the communication between each other is chaotic, the work effect is naturally unsatisfactory.
A competent team leader does not necessarily play the role of "think tank" or ultimate decision maker in the team, but is primarily responsible for pushing for consensus. If, in a discussion, the leader draws premature conclusions, people will not speak out even if they have their own ideas, and the final decision that may be made may not be optimal. If leaders are open-minded and don't impose their own opinions, but instead encourage everyone to speak up and don't talk about their opinions until the end of the discussion, the final decision will be much better.
In this sense, the less the team leader intervenes, the better the leadership effect. Some team leaders are not often in the team, in such a team everyone achieves good results, the team can run smoothly on its own.
Someone once studied the self-managed customer service team of a large telephone company in the United States. The results show that if leaders are instructing employees too often, even making encouraging suggestions can make team members feel intimidated when they work. The team members seem to have two feelings about the so-called suggestions of their superiors: one is that they think they are not doing well, so the superior leader comes to help, and the morale of everyone is affected; the other is that they think they are doing a good job, and the leader intervenes to command at will.
The author has consulted experienced supervisors and managers about the circumstances under which the teams they belong to or manage are generally enthusiastic, super-high-level, and into a state of trance, and they mention the following characteristics many times.
• A seemingly daunting challenge can also be a mission of great value. A vice president of Lockheed Martin's space launch systems told me, "One of the reasons team goals often fail is because it's too utilitarian. The projects I pursue are unusual, and to achieve my goals, it takes the efforts of the whole team. "This kind of work has great significance and impetus. Working on a task that matters a lot of work makes everyone on the team happy to give it their all.
The late Nobel laureate in physics, Richard Feynman, recalled that researchers working on the Manhattan Project had very different attitudes before and after learning the truth. Initially, secrecy was strict, so the researchers working on the entire program were kept in the dark and didn't know what they were doing. As a result, work has been slow and always unsatisfactory.
Feynman persuaded Robert Oppenheimer to tell the technicians the purpose of the project and other truths, so that they knew that what they were developing was a weapon that could stop the Axis enemy from advancing. It was the most difficult period of the Second World War, and the Axis powers had the upper hand. Feynman recalls that since telling team members about the purpose of the development, "things have changed completely." Technicians began to find ways to do a better job, working day and night." Feynman estimates that after technicians knew the goal of the work, the work progressed 10 times faster than in the past.
• Strong team loyalty is also an important factor. Daniel Kim is one of the founders of the Center for Organizational Cognitive Learning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States and currently works at the Pagsos Communication Agency. "When team members who excel spoke about why they were successful, they emphasized their genuine love and concern for their team," he says. If people fairly evaluate what makes these great teams, they will admit that part of the reason is the emotional bond between the members. This emotional connection allows team members to be honest and care for each other. ”
• Team members need to be diverse in their strengths. The more a team can take full advantage of its diverse capabilities at work, the more flexible it will be to meet changing task requirements. The diversity of team members' abilities is not only reflected in the technical ability of employees. Force, too, now requires employees to have emotional abilities, including cohesion.
• Mutual trust and selfless cooperation are another secret of success. In a successful team, everyone feels that they can rely on each other. Bob Taylor had organized a team at Xerox that later succeeded in developing a user-friendly computer prototype. This prototype actually laid the foundation for the first Apple machine, and unfortunately Xerox did not develop further. When Taylor formed his team, he took care to pick people who were good at working with others and encouraged everyone to help each other. Alan Kay, one of the first scientists to be invited to join the R&D team at the time, recalls: "40 percent of the time at work, you were probably assisting other team members. ”
• Dedication and enthusiasm – to achieve an ambitious goal you must go all out. For people in the team who are focused on their work, other aspects of life are ordinary small things compared to tasks, and during the struggle for the goal, they will temporarily put these small things aside and work hard. In this way, the whole team seems to be a separate and exclusive workspace, and everyone is not disturbed by the outside world and works hard. The Manhattan Project was conducted in a highly classified location, accessible only to researchers working on the program. Lockheed's "Task Force" project was also conducted in a windowless, unmarked building, and other company personnel and unrelated people were strictly prohibited from entering.
• The work itself is fun and rewarding. This kind of work that requires people to go all out and is highly engaged has a strong attraction in itself, and can attract team members to work hard, not to get rich and pursue fame and profit, but to make people feel satisfied by the task itself. Whether this passion for work comes from an achievement drive or an attempt to expand its influence, there is a strong emotion that drives you. This emotion makes us want to do better as part of a team than other employees in the organization. A member of The General Data's software team said: "I have an inexplicable excitement when I work, and I can't say it clearly, just want to succeed." ”
Read more: "Emotional Intelligence 3: Emotional Intelligence at Work That Will Impact Your Life" daniel Goleman
(To be continued)