Friday, August 21, 2009

Leading my team

I put this together a year or so ago for my benefit.  I try to instill this in my team.  Do you have any thoughts?

Dean’s Core beliefs

  1. Urgency – have a sense of urgency, be available to others, be urgent in your response to each other. Respond.  If you are not sure how urgent something is, ask.
  2. Check behind yourself follow up, be accountable
  3. Complexity – do not underestimate the complexity of our systems.
  4. Teamwork – we need to function as a team, be available.
  5. Instant messaging and emails cubicle-to-cubicle should not happen.  Get up and go talk.
  6. Understand why.  Ask questions.  A request does not obligate IT.  Make sure you understand the NEED, not just the request.
  7. Coverage – Everyone works at least 8 hours a day.  Everyone arrives by 9am, make sure there is coverage including lunches.
  8. Confidence levels – need to know your stuff, be confident in answer and be right in the answer.  If you don’t know, say so.
  9. Commitment and accountability.  Your word is your commitment, keep each other accountable to your word and commitments
  10.  Time management – encourage to turn off outlook pop-ups, msn, etc. get rid of distractions.  ( I think we can now add Twitter and Facebook!

Any thoughts?  What core beliefs do you instill in your team?

3 comments:

jaysonrowe said...

I agree 100% in regards to face-to-face vs. IM/Phone, however I still like to IM someone to make sure they are available before popping up @ their cube unannounced.

Also, I do think we can now add Twitter and Facebook as distractions.

I seldom use Facebook directly, since my tweets go there. I only check Facebook when someone comments, or writes on my wall.

As for Twitter, I keep TweetDeck running, however I keep it out of view unless I'm checking it, and I keep all forms of notifications turned off, so it's there if I want to take a "micro-break" and look through my incoming tweets, but it's not constantly intruding as I see it do on co-workers machines. I don't know how some people deal with the constant "noise".

Anonymous said...

trust...would be a nice addition

Dean Lisenby said...

This is one reason I don't like anonymous comments. I can't get this message back to the poster. Regardless, I was not attempting to build the fundamentals of a team. See http://sequimur.com/banditsnomore/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/fivedysfunctions.gif

Regardless, I assume items like TRUST have to exist in order to even have a team.

Dean