EVERYTHING is team work

In the world of TOP sports occasionally a coach will have a 1 on 1 with one of his players. Something which is not unfamiliar to Team leaders / Managers / Project managers in our business too.

This often happens when the coach wishes to criticize the player and/or his/her performance. ?

Mostly they both come out with a press release stating that what had to be said was said between the four walls of the room and that is exactly where it will stay as the club does not “wash the dirty linen in public”.

The question afterwards usually is “who will be the first one to leak it to the press” ….

However, it is my opinion that these personal sessions not only do not contribute to the team process but they affect them in a negative way as they do within project management teams in general and Agile development teams in particular.

The purpose of any communicative process involving team members, should be to the benefit of the project team and its continuous improvement of processes. A 1 on 1 session excludes many members and can therefore not be used for the aforementioned.

I am willing to state that there is no such thing as an individual sport/business project and that all sports (and business project) achievements are a result of team work.

A tennis pro, a Judoka, a swimmer: they are all performing on their own but, and this is a big but, the amount of time a team worked on their performance is so much bigger than the end performance itself.

Take for example the Judoka who has to engage in a fight of 4 minutes. Do we even comprehend how much time and effort was invested by a coach, a physical therapist, a sports psychologist, sponsors, personal manager, the sportsman family and many more?

The 4 minutes in which the Judoka has to win the fight are the end stage of a very long TEAM process.

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Now to a business world example:

I was unsatisfied by a service I experienced at a cellular provider “service center”. I decided to write a letter to the company in which I explained my experience.

Within a few days I received a phone call from a lady who identified herself as the service center manager asking me for more details regarding the event as they are “continuously trying to improve our service” (her words). She told me about their business improvement efforts. I told her about the whole thing and her first reaction was: “In your complaint letter you did not mention the name of our project team representative with whom you had the interaction”

I reacted by saying that it was not a complaint letter but a letter of service from me to them, and the purpose of the letter was to help them improve their service, just as she stated they were trying to do all the time.

I expect/advise her to take this letter and use it in the next project management representatives team meeting where she could read it out loud and together with all 19 members, they could analyze the contents and come up with ways of improvement.

Mentioning the name of the particular team member would be useless and non-contributing to the process improvement because it would make it all about the person instead of about the issue and the issue concerns all 19 members of the team.

The advantages of doing a “1 on 1 with the whole project team present” are:

A - Attacking the Issue and not the individual

B - Team learning for the benefit of continuous improvement