I love when a team hits on all cylinders: when everyone acts with their specialty and we collectively achieve more
I should have written about this fun interaction with the core team working on the alumni community site this spring.
Four of us were on a call. We were struggling to figure out a technical challenge. We wanted to do something that the host software didn’t seem capable of doing. We felt close to giving up.
Would we have to pay for the higher tier? Pay for a service call with the company? Switch software? Give up on functionality we wanted?
One guy mentioned how a text message outside the system had prompted him to act in the way the the software was supposed to.
I commented that we might be able to work around at least part of the deficiency.
Another person commented how we could do something more.
We kept taking partial solutions and building on them to solve a little more, then a little more, and so on.
Next thing you know, we figured out a solution that would work better than our original hope. The details aren’t the point.
The point is the teamwork of each person listening, offering up something new, the next person building on that response, and so on until we solved the problem. One guy would add something he knew best, the next guy came up with something he knew best that no one else knew at all, and so on.
We worked as a team beyond what any one of us could have done on our own. The mood of the call rose as we solved sub-problem after sub-problem until we solved the whole thing.
That mood felt great. It reminded me of playing sports, when a play ran on the field perfectly, like we practiced, or sometimes even better when the play broke down but we congealed as a team to make it work anyway. This business teamwork wasn’t as intense as the sports teamwork, but it felt more meaningful since we’re solving a global problem.
I love when teamwork clicks. It feels like what we as humans were born for.
Sadly, for all the years I played ultimate, I have almost no images or video of me playing. To illustrate, here’s the video from an old post from playing in North Korea in 2011: Getting the block and game-winning goal in North Korea’s first Ultimate Frisbee tournament. You’ll see me younger than today, with long hair, but still a lot older than my prime.
Still, for this post, it shows teamwork. We scored the last point in the last game of the tournament. It was a fun tournament, not the level of competition I played at when younger, but how often do you get to play in the first ever ultimate tournament in North Korea?
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