Of Love, Life, Happiness … and Teams?

Source: The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch

What better way to learn about how to live your life than from a dying cancer patient that loved his life and continued to love his life despite cancer. Due to this blog, I’ve started taking notes every time I read a book. This book has a lot of important lessons! I was categorizing them under love, life, communication and a category that came to my surprise was teams. However, its really no surprise that he did this in his book because so much of what we do involves working with others and effective communication.

Randy Pausch was a professor at Carnegie Mellon and he had his students work in teams in his classes but what made him special was that he really taught them how to work in a team. He made students rate their teammates on how easy it was to work with them and made these results public. He always found that the students that were hard to work with never knew that about themselves until this data was made available to them. Of course they were also defensive and hard to convince that the data was indeed accurate. More on how he dealt with that later.

Randy had the following to say about working in a team:

1. Have something to bring to the table because that will make you more welcome.
2. Start by sitting together in class
3. Meet people properly – learn to pronounce names
4. Find things you have in common
5. Try for optimal meeting conditions – during meals
6. Let everyone talk – don’t finish sentences for others
7. Check egos at the door – Give names to ideas that are representative of the idea and not the person
8. Praise each other
9. Phrase alternatives as questions – use the word instead 

These are useful instructions but what struck me was how lucky his students were to have a professor that was willing to be an unbiased enforcer. He taught and showed them proactively the advantages of working together.

Do all teams need an enforcer to function properly and be productive? Should each team have an assigned enforcer from the beginning? How do we ensure the enforcer isn’t biased? The government uses checks and balances but we also know what happens when the enforcers become biased. Things come to a standstill and teams become dysfunctional. How we do we fix this? How do we move forward and get back to productivity? History shows us that a leader has to rise. A person that rises to change the status quo is on his way to be a great leader. When this person doesn’t let the confines of their position limit their ability to make a difference, that’s when there will be growth. Friction causes leaders to emerge. Friction shows us each teammate’s true commitment to the end goal. Enforcers should be put back in their place and the team needs to get back on track with the vision.

When a student on Randy’s research team was particularly difficult to work with, this is what Randy had to say. “I know you are smart. Everyone here is smart. Smart isn’t enough. The kind of people I want on my research team are those who will help everyone else feel happy to be here.”

Are you willing to check your ego at the door? Are you willing to help others feel happy to be a part of the team? Are you ready to be a teammate first? Will you stand up in conflict and make a contribution? Have you in the past? If not, are you willing to change?

How you choose to react in situations defines the type of person you are and I hope you will react in a way that will shape you in to a great leader.

Let me know what you think.