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
- 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.
- Check behind yourself follow up, be accountable
- Complexity – do not underestimate the complexity of our systems.
- Teamwork – we need to function as a team, be available.
- Instant messaging and emails cubicle-to-cubicle should not happen. Get up and go talk.
- Understand why. Ask questions. A request does not obligate IT. Make sure you understand the NEED, not just the request.
- Coverage – Everyone works at least 8 hours a day. Everyone arrives by 9am, make sure there is coverage including lunches.
- Confidence levels – need to know your stuff, be confident in answer and be right in the answer. If you don’t know, say so.
- Commitment and accountability. Your word is your commitment, keep each other accountable to your word and commitments
- 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:
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".
trust...would be a nice addition
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
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