Your Whole Team

(Image from Science For Work)

If you heard me talk last week with AHDB’s AgriLeader interviewers, they were especially interested in how to lead a team and motivate the people in a team.

They wanted to know how I chose my team at the Space Center. I didn’t get to choose the team in the lab. Management made those choices. In many ways I faced the same challenge I found in volunteer work. In both places, I couldn’t offer pay or promotions as incentives.

What could I do? Acknowledge what people did and what they knew. People want to feel their expertise and effort are recognized and appreciated. It would have been the height of arrogance and stupidity for me to act like I knew better than the world class experts on my team, or take their work for granted.

In a course I took back then about being a first line supervisor, we did an exercise where the instructor gave us a list of ways we could motivate workers and asked us to rank them by importance. All the others were men. They all put pay or promotion at the top of their list, in that order or the reverse order.

I didn’t. I had things like appreciation and recognition at the top. A man next to me said, “You’re going to have to reorder your priorities.”

I decided everyone else in the room was wrong. For the next twenty minutes we had an intense discussion.

While I was in the program, sometimes I needed to have the print shop make copies of documents. I tried not to wait until it would be a rush job and would say up front that I was in no hurry. I also noticed the print shop was mostly staffed by women and they liked flowers. I brought a few carnations sometimes. When I did need a rush job, I said so, apologized and made sure I brought flowers. In fact, recently I had needed some printing in a hurry and they did it in record time.

A manager sitting across from me interrupted. “I know why you got your print job done so fast. Because they didn’t do my rush job!” Turning red in the face, he carried on about how much he had ranted at them, trying to get them to do his job right away. In the midst of that, the penny dropped. “Oh!”

When I left the lab and went to another part of the program, that manager is the one who transferred me into his department. I wanted to learn more about IT and that’s what his group did.

You see, my team wasn’t limited to the people I worked with directly. The print shop was an entirely different department from where I worked. My whole team included people whose jobs didn’t seem, on the surface, like they were connected with me.

The people you work with directly aren’t the only ones to consider. Never underestimate the value of people who may be regarded as below you in the pecking order. They keep everything humming along. The print shop, clerical workers, secretaries, cleaners… They deserve appreciation and respect as much as the gurus do.

How much is that worth?

During one of my contracts at a large telecom company, the head of the janitorial crew took me aside one day. “I want to tell you about what I found in the vice president’s trash can…” My client was about to swing a big axe through its workforce. The janitor gave me confidential advance notice. Let’s just say that was useful.

Take care of your team (your whole team) and they’ll take care of you.