Peer to Peer Magazine

We hear a lot about the importance of “teams” –– building an esprit du corps, “it takes a village,” etc. Several ILTAns recently sat down at the virtual roundtable to share their views on teamwork. Each person’s interview can be heard in its entirety in the accompanying podcasts. How important is the concept of “team success” to you and your staff? Joy: A young manager once bragged to me how many times she’d ridden to the rescue of her team’s projects. My response — much to her surprise — was “You failed!” I went on to explain that if she was always “rescuing” her coworkers, she was not contributing to the success of the group. Skip: Our firm strives to be a premier labor and employment law firm, which means our attorneys have to focus on offering premier service to our clients. We in IT, then, must continually provide premier services and support to them, and to all our internal customers. That’s always a challenge but never an option; teamwork and team success are vital to accomplishing the mission in the most efficient and timely manner possible. What specific steps should be taken to build and maintain strong teams? Scott: You’ve got to hire people with proven collaboration and team-building skills. Teams managed by people who know how to facilitate team interaction are the teams that go on to be high performing and produce better deliverables on projects. Judi: I look for opportunities to mix and match individual talents and interests among both senior and junior members of the department. Strong teams are ones with a group mentality based on compatible abilities and common goals. Joy: Yes, and it’s important for each individual member of the team to understand his or her role. Nothing stresses team success more than someone who feels he’s carrying too much of the burden and/or that others aren’t sharing the load. And then communicate, communicate, communicate. You’ve got to convey the right information at the right time. We do that through our “9 at 9” meetings. During critical deadline periods, the whole team gets together at nine o’clock for around nine minutes to share information and be sure we’re all on track. Is there a place for individual recognition, and if so, how do you reward personal achievements while maintaining a team approach? Scott: I like to do a lot of individual praising. I firmly believe good old-fashioned praise goes a long way toward motivating individuals and teams to keep up the good work. As the One- Minute Manager might say, “Catch them doing things right and keep reinforcing that.” Sean: When I want to acknowledge the individual success of a team member outside of the group, I generally refer to it as a team success. I then reward the individual for that success, monetarily or otherwise. In other words, recognition is the public side, reward the private side. Skip: Right. People respond well to being recognized for their accomplishments and contributions to the firm. We’ve given bonuses, gift cards, awards — even held a special summit where we brought in all the IT folks to be publically recognized for their accomplishments. As you do hand out praise, your voice carries more weight than your e-mail message. Make a phone call, or better yet, praise them in person. Joy: If you’re a middle manager in particular, make sure your superiors know when someone is standing out, but frame that person’s success within the context of the success of the team. And when you give individual recognition in a team setting, communicate clearly why that person is being singled out, but associate his accomplishment with what the entire team has done together to enable that success. Judi: I try on a fairly regular basis to take an individual or the entire group out to coffee or lunch or cocktails after work. That’s more of an informal way to give recognition for a job well done and chat about things like what they’re working on, their successes and frustrations, and how they’re getting along with peers. From time to time, we also provide passes to movies, and when an employee has been putting in a tremendous amount of time on a project, we like to tell him to take his or her significant other out for dinner and give us the receipt for reimbursement. Have you experienced situations where a person or a group was attempting to undermine the team concept? If so, how did you handle it? Scott: Sometimes the undermining isn’t malicious, only the expression of a difference of opinion in a non-productive Peer to Peer the quarterly magazine of ILTA 25

• Cover