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June 07, 2004
Working Together
I talked to my new supervisor at work today about some problems that I had at work this weekend. She was frustrated with what happened partly because of a mistake on a form she filled out incorrectly and partly because no-one told her about it until I came to work almost a week after she did it. Every staff person has to look at this form and do the work instructions according to the form. So, theoretically someone should have caught the mistake and told her about it.
One thing my supervisor said out of frustration was, “We all have to work together. Someone should have told me about this sooner.” It was kind of a critical task and I agree with my supervisor. Part of the problem was that no-one wanted to fix the mistake, they just wanted to place the blame on the new supervisor, as if they were absolved of all responsibility. We all have to work together is a truth that eludes many workplaces. Teamwork requires effort and an attitude of looking out for everyone’s best interest. Keeping the team functioning requires good communication between all members of the team.
I once taught a computer class at a technical college with another person. The class ran 3 nights per week and I taught on Mondays and Wednesdays. My co-teacher taught on Tuesday nights. We were both working out of the same syllabus for the whole semester.
We discovered right away that we needed to agree on what we were teaching and communicate to each other after every class period so the other teacher knew what was covered and what the problems were. The students invariable asked us both the same questions. We needed to have a unified and correct answer for them.
Some of the students even tried to blame the other teacher for teaching them something that wasn’t working correctly. We had to have a level of trust and professionalism with each other. So we emailed each other every day and copied our supervisor on our communications. He was grateful for the updates and the school used our communications as a model for other courses with multiple teachers. It works really well as long as we are working together.
Teams work better when everyone is working together for a common cause. Having attitudes against other team members doesn't help. Life is like this. When we work together in life and help each other out then humanity works better.
Posted by carl1236 at June 7, 2004 11:12 PM | Love your Neighbor