TEAM

I listened to the congresswoman from Tennessee on the news today. She described how her momma had an acronym for TEAM. It was “together everyone achieves more“. As they dug deeper on what she thought of the current standoff in congress on the government partial shutdown, she said ” my constituents want me to focus on helping move the presidents promises forward”.

She focuses on family, freedom, faith, opportunity and prosperity. How wonderful!! What is there to object to?

Steve Jobs said, ” Great things in business are never done by one person.”

We are not a team because we work together. We are a team because we respect, trust and care for each other.

Great teams do not occur naturally. They require team members with technical, interpersonal, communication and emotional intelligence skills.

Three key questions in program evaluation:

1. How well are we doing?
2. How do we know?
3. How can we improve things further?

I have noticed that you have to pick your team carefully. There are unforeseen dynamics and everyone has a secondary gain. In the last “team” that I managed, two of the “team members” capitalized on my work to move their professional career recognition forward. I went to their award ceremonies and thought about how little they actually did for the project, while they skated to personal victory.  Neither of them are on my latest “team” but I expect some difficulty with 9 team members. I feel that it is too many, but the stakeholders must be represented. It’s always an interesting dynamic!

Lily Ann is definitely NOT a team player. She wants what she wants and crowds in to get her way. But, she’s a dog…..people should be able to understand and do better!