Goals can be flexible, and not just metaphorically. Flexibility is what allows you to improve your reach. It’s what protects you when you move, fast or strong. Flexibility delivers stability and lets you breathe, in and out. Goals are the tip of your reach. The target. The final, scalable, observable destination. In the pursuit of goals, teams are relentless, yet not always productive. Hence, let’s find out how flexible planning, goals, and productivity interconnect.
A lot of articles out there talk about introverts and extroverts. As well as how to deal with their personality traits. However, they hardly provide clarity as to what it means to be introverted or extroverted. Or what managers should do to accommodate such variation within any team. Since this a common issue, we decided to explore it. And also offer some tips. You will better understand what introversion and extroversion entail at team level. Furthermore, how to deal with conflicts fueled by such differences.
The best work organization is using teams. We’ve known this for ages. Humans have been doing job specialization long before they even had a word for it. This is responsible for our success and for who we are, intimately. It explains the modern fascination with our deeply-seated sense of self. As well as the remarkable capacity we have to do work collaboratively.
People that manage people. People that manage teams of people. Getting things done. Delegating. Leaders of the shared timeline. Managers. Characteristically responsible for “acting in ways” that enable individuals to outperform themselves in favor of their contribution to a team effort. Managers who empower teams to achieve their best, to maximize the outputs with minimal inputs. Constantly striving for consistency, value, punctuality. Managers trying to remain relevant in this new world of business, with flattened hierarchies and autonomous employees.
Today, everything changes “ahead of time.” Technology underwent so many transformations in the past few decades, orders of magnitude more than it did before. This has changed everything about work and people. How work can be done, monitored, congregated. The way people act and interact. What they’re interested in, the news they read, the hobbies they have. Everything.
So you’ve just put together your dream team and Shaq and Kobe aren’t playing nice together. There is so much potential, and you just cringe when untapped resources go to waste. No matter how professional each individual is, teams will always have miscommunication problems. Personality clashes, power issues, and lack of clarity over team goals will always make collaboration and communication difficult with some members. Let’s say that your superstar team is above that. Bad things can still happen: important emails ending in the spam folder, people forgetting about meetings or missing deadlines.
Deadlines are the clenching teeth of the cogwheels of civilization. You probably have some experience with meeting deadlines. Nowadays, however, it’s all about teams meeting and beating deadlines.
Truly remarkable achievements are most often team results. Gone are the days of patent-office clerks submitting world-changing papers on theoretical physics. And even Einstein needed help from expert mathematicians. Ironically, perfecting teamwork is a challenge in its own right. This is why we’ll be covering several important topics on the matter. This is our “perfecting teamwork” series.
Until recently, 4PSA has had a pretty standard organization, with function-based departments – Sales and Marketing, Software Development (with many teams), Technical Support, Administration, Human Resources etc. This worked decently for many years and that is why I still recommend it as the default organization for any company really focused on a single product.