Happy New Year! Thanks for finding your way back to the Brush Fire Forum here in 2013. Most of us have made our return to the world of work after the holidays by now, so I hope each of you has had a relatively stress-free week and that you still have some of that lingering holiday spirit alive in you.
I used some of my free time over the past couple weeks to catch up on the other articles on the forum, and I was both impressed and intimidated. This site is the online home to several amazing minds, and I am more than honored to share the space with all of them. In particular, I was reading some very insightful thoughts about higher education from Dr. Shanon Brooks – President of Monticello College in Utah – and it got me thinking about my own college days.
Quite honestly, it would be nearly impossible to get offered a job at the company I work for now without having a college degree. Fair or not, having that achievement in your past has become the standard by which applicants are first measured. It would literally not matter if you received your diploma in darkroom yoga and only passed by a tenth of a point. That school’s endorsement of your ability to fulfill some set of requirements to their liking would give you an advantage over the applicant who did not attend college.
When I look back on my own college years – four years spent in the business program of a large orange-wearing public university in the southeast – I can barely recall the classes that I took, much less the material they covered. In fact, when I evaluate the career I have now and the tasks I perform on a regular basis, there are only two real aspects of my college education experience that seem to have proven lasting and beneficial to me. The first would be learning to adapt to new computer software and hardware as quickly and as intuitively as possible. The second – and biggest – benefit would be learning how to operate within a team to complete assignments.
At long last, that brings us to this week’s Cubicle Survival Guide tip: be an influencer and not an alienator. In the modern workplace, almost nothing can be accomplished without the help of a group or a team. There may be aspects of your job that you have complete and total control and accountability for, but you will inevitably find yourself assigned to a special project or committee at some point. Working directly with others can be either the most rewarding or most demoralizing moments in a career. When things are going well and the team has a lot of (buzzword warning) “synergy,” lots of progress is made and everyone is happy. If the team has conflicts of personality or style that can’t be overcome, the mission will fail and everyone will look bad in the process.
Looking back on my college days, group assignments dominated the final two years of my education, and I am now thankful for that. I was able to experience working with a diverse set of individuals in teams that sometimes performed well and sometimes performed poorly. All the while, I learned a lot about the dynamics of working within a group, and even more about myself and how I behaved in these settings. At first, I never wanted to take the lead on a project, because I did not want to seem bossy or arrogant. Over time, I learned to sense when a team was going poorly and when to try and assert myself more. The most important thing I learned – that has without question improved my career path and that I am sharing with you this week – is that you must learn to influence the team and its direction without alienating the people with which you are working. It sounds simple enough, but it takes lots of practice and self-control. Once you master this skill, though, you can impact any group you find yourself in regardless of your position within its hierarchy.
The best starting point in embracing this Cubicle Survival Guide tip is to recall the immortal words of the esteemed business mind Rob Van Winkle aka Vanilla Ice when he said “all right stop, collaborate, and listen.”
If you can keep that advice in your head the next time you sit down for your first meeting with a new work team, you will find improved success. Let’s break down his wise lyrical advice one step at a time.
If you can keep that advice in your head the next time you sit down for your first meeting with a new work team, you will find improved success. Let’s break down his wise lyrical advice one step at a time.
Stop. I admit this one is pretty simple. All we are advising is refraining from too much action until the dynamics of the team start to come into focus. In most cases, the person that feels compelled to do most of the talking in the first meeting of a new group is the worst possible person to lead things. Don’t be that person. Everyone will leave that first meeting mentally scheming ways to undermine that person because they are already irritated by them. You don’t want to be a wallflower, either, but resist the urge to dominate the initial conversations of the group or risk alienating your new teammates from the very first minute.
Collaborate. This step is often the hardest to follow because sometimes in life you will end up on a team with a member that is just defective. We all know it is true, so there is no need to sugarcoat it. There are people in all of our offices that have a reputation of not working well with others or of being a complete space cadet. Either one can drag an entire team of otherwise talented professionals into failure. This is where you must hone the ability to influence without alienating. You have to find the right message and tone to convey to the person that is holding the group back that their thoughts and opinions are valid but not the best fit for the current direction of the project. The key is to also recognize when you might be that person stubbornly holding a team back, and know when it is time to embrace a different viewpoint and support the group.
Listen. The final step is the most important, and if you miss it, you will always be an alienator instead of influencer. It is crucial that every member of the team trusts that you are hearing them when they offer their opinions and ideas. If you earn the reputation that you do not listen to input from others, you will lose all credibility with your teammates. That credibility is necessary to influence the direction and decisions of a group, so once it is lost, you are essentially just along for the ride as far as that team’s success or failure. That is not a comfortable position to be in, so I advise you to avoid it. The old saying is that God gave us two ears and one mouth, so that we could listen twice as much as we talk, and that is the perfect goal to set for your interactions within a work group.
There are few feelings as great in life as the pride of finding success as a team. As humans, we crave positive relationships with others, and accomplishing a goal or meeting an objective with a group creates that bond. Being on winning teams is paramount to surviving in the cubicle jungle, so remember the advice of Vanilla Ice the next time you find yourself assembled around a conference table for a project kickoff meeting.
