Teamwork

Many have been waiting for the ??? 2024 United States Presidential election results for a long time.

Some are pleased. Some are frustrated. I have my opinion and I'm sure you have yours. But my opinion and how I feel about it is not the point.

The point is how we move ?? forward. How we respond. How we step up and keep going on. And we need to do this together. We absolutely need to do this together.

What do you do when you have members of a team that are hard to work with, disagree with you, make you frustrated from time-to-time?

I'm always curious to ask and learn how others feel about this when I conduct interviews with prospective employees and partners in business.

There's a phrase I have about teamwork: you gotta work with the team you have.

We gotta do the best work we can with the team we have.

We need to work with the team we have. We can't stop our work as a team. We can't quit. We can't take a day off. We can't wait until the people we disagree with move on or change their ways. No. We can't do that. The clock is ticking.

We all have a finite amount of time.

We have to work with the team as-is. We have to do the best with the team we have. We can make changes as we go along, but we have to negotiate, find common ground, embrace our differences, agree to disagree.

Inclusion is valuing and integrating the contributions of a diverse group of people

I believe we can achieve our greatest successes with a positive, can-do attitude, with the best team we can assemble, and diversity of skill-set, background, and ideas.

If we choose only to work with the people we like or people that look and think like us we are limiting our market to only serve those who are like us. We are limiting our ability to reach everyone who can benefit from our work. We are only cheating ourselves. And its not worth it.

I believe we must focus on moving forward, embracing our differences, and working with the team(s) we have.

Teamwork makes the dream work.

I thought that was the lamest excuse for overly-optimistic thinking, but, it's grown on me.

The famous quote "Teamwork makes the dream work" was first coined by John C. Maxwell in his 2002 book of the same name. He emphasized the importance of collaboration and a strong team dynamic in achieving ambitious goals.

Atlassian does a great job explaining the origin story here: https://www.atlassian.com/blog/teamwork/teamwork-makes-the-dream-work

John Maxwell Team shares this concept well here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdf3lV2RIpU

Let go of frustrations, and work together to come up with solutions

When something doesn't go the way you'd like it to, give yourself time to take a retrospective ( Atlassian overview page link). We do it in agile software development sprint cycles. Let yourself have this time and healing as well.

According to 谷歌 Gemini: "Retrospectives are valuable because they help teams improve their performance, communication, and productivity by learning from their successes and failures. They also provide a safe space for teams to share feedback, celebrate wins, and work together to solve problems."

Let's work together, and move forward.

There's a tradition at National Grid by my colleague Edward Brodsky to have a walkout song for every all-hands meeting in the org. In the spirit of continuing that tradition and sharing it with you all, here's Let's Work Together by Canned Heat. It reminds me to get to work and work as a team no matter where we're coming from.