Weekly Thoughts
Most weeks Eagle's Flight Ireland likes to share our thoughts on things that caught our attention during the week and give a training and development perspective on them. We hope you enjoy this weeks contribution!
1. When the going gets tough – what happens to collaboration?
I’ve written before about collaboration. It’s well documented that collaboration works. More is always achieved through the cohesive combination of numerous people’s efforts than through a solo approach.
However, there are times when it is difficult to collaborate. There are times when the project is at risk of failing; failure may seem imminent. Individual minds can be forgiven for drifting from thoughts of collaboration to thoughts of self-preservation. How will I show in the review that this was ‘not my fault’?
What has impressed me this week in the wake of Ireland’s defeat to Scotland in the Six Nations is the quotes from players and management coming out of the camp. As a supporter, it was probably the most disappointing result in the last decade. The Irish team and management must have felt as if under siege in the past week. Questions have been asked of the management team, the captain, the ability of the players.
What do we hear from the camp? The players have shouldered the blame for not finishing chances. The management team has fully supported the new captain and stated their confidence in the team’s ability to bounce back. The manager has said that his own position is not the concern. He just wants to help the team do as well as they can. Whatever your personal opinion in relation to the fortunes of Irish rugby, you cannot deny that the messages coming out of the Irish camp are an example to us all, of the attitude required to get a project back on track.
When a project your involved in is going astray, what would you be quoted as saying?
2. The time-lag between effort and reward.
Recently I was trying to find where it was first said that after 10 years somebody was an overnight success (or words to that effect). There’s a lot of truth packed into that short phrase. We rarely if ever see the graft that goes into success.
Delivering on a truly fantastic project in the workplace does not happen overnight. It wouldn’t be uncommon for them to take well over a year or more. This may be opening up a new market for a product or redesigning a production system, to reduce waste and down-time. The effort is great, so too is the reward.
What often happens is that though the rewards are great we lose momentum. Why? The time involved. When the results and benefits are so far off in the distance we often put off the things we need to be doing today in order to bring the project to fruition. Because the time is so great we don’t fully appreciate the causal relationship between what we are doing now (or not doing) and the impact that this is having on results.
The only place where success comes before effort is in the dictionary. Successful project owners are prepared to put in huge effort now, knowing that they will have to wait for the rewards and plaudits. Are you?
