Your team status quo may just be “good enough.”
You are tired of reading all of the articles nudging you to move away from “what got you and your company to where you are today.” Apparently that process and those struggles are not good enough…. To use as your trajectory for getting you to where you need to be Tomorrow and in the Future.
Your reality is that you have a great job working for a company that pretty much is stuck in that proverbial status quo. Except you and your team have injected innovation and creativity into your workplace.
Over time, the word got out. Your seemingly insignificant work hacks generated interest from other teams throughout your company.
What you initiated is catching on. Your actions allow your company to become “unstuck” from the status quo while preserving all of the good things your company was built upon.
Here’s what your team does to be – and remain – “Good Enough” for today, tomorrow and the future.
Work Hack #1: My team is not complacent even though our daily activities are repetitive. We talk about whether we operate on auto-pilot rather than remaining engaged in each project, each activity. We are conscientious about always being on our toes.
Work Hack #2: My team frequently dips into the well of knowledge and expertise in my company. We have a diverse, multi-generational workplace culture. Our team often seeks out the expertise of older, as well as younger, employees with expertise currently outside of our skill sets. We bring back this learning and incorporate it into how we approach our projects.
Work Hack #3: My team engages in self-directed online education, sometimes at our own expense. Sure, in the best of all possible worlds, our company would offer continuing education to all of our employees. Instead of making it someone else’s fault, our team explored how each member could pursue learning in different areas which complement the focus of the team as a whole. When we put together the sum total of everyone’s educational arsenal, we have all learned a lot this year.
Work Hack #4: We decided to cross-pollinate our reading, too. My team now reads a lot of articles in our own functional area as well as other company functional areas. We laughed when we realized we all watched way too much reality TV and our idea of reading basically was popular magazines. We weren’t keeping up on what really was happening in terms of our industry vertical and the functional areas impacting the other business units in our company. So we created a lunchtime reading club. We meet once a week to discuss a relevant article we can all weigh in on.
Regardless of the state of health of your current company, these team work hacks positively impact your self-confidence, education and expertise. Everyone gets smarter in the process as you learn to work together as a team.
Put them into play. Watch what happens.
Babette N. Ten Haken builds innovative, productive and profitable teams focused on excellence in the execution of strategy. Her Playbook on collaboration hacks, including tools, Do YOU Mean Business? is available on Amazon.com.
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