At the moment I am establishing teams to work on projects for the Centre I am currently working at. The Centre, Hold the Future, provides vocational training to young disabled people as well as an opportunity to earn a living making handicraft products.
There are a number of projects that are outside the normal scope of the Centre’s activities that we are currently focused on. They fall under fund raising and public relations efforts.
Amongst these are a new website and the design and manufacture of merchandising products to use for loyalty programmes and fundraising drives. Add to this articles, images and video to spread the message via a string of conventional media as well as the newer social media channels and one can immediately see that external help is going to be a must.
It seems the best way forward is to use teams to manage and drive each project along. Picking a team leader with energy and focus will be critical but the rest of the team members are important too.
A short video by Tom Peters has a great point to make regarding diversity and teams. View it here, it’s imminently watchable. Tom Peters mentions a book on the topic and here are the details for that for those who might be interested in taking a closer look at the subject.
His main point regarding teams is that the more diverse the composition the more effective the team is. Avoid so-called subject matter experts or in-house narrow focused department members.
To build great teams one should embrace different cultures, educational levels, languages and gender for instance in order to optimise the dynamic power this diversity will generate. Makes sense to me.
PS
There will be more articles on my work at Hold the Future in Hanoi Vietnam on this blog. Subscribe to the feed or provide your email address to get articles emailed to you. If you would like to get involved in the Centre’s work by giving some of your time please email me direct at anja at hqlondon dot net.
on Mar 27th, 2010 at 5:54 pm
Diversity is fine, maybe up to about 99% in all endeavors.
But not that last remaining 1%. In that small fraction you’ll find critical factors which, if left out, would make the remaining 99% an abject failure.
What’s in that unifying 1%, so important to sucess? How about:
“Treat others the way you wish to be treated”
or
“We hold these truths to be self evident”
There’s a lot more in that meager 1%, too numerous for this page.
By all means, be diverse, but don’t abandon precepts that make us great as a nation.
on Mar 27th, 2010 at 9:34 pm
Another thing about teams is finding people who are enthusiastic about what they do. Nothing worse than having 5 people with no real enthusiasm for what they do.
In a lot of ways you are only as poweful as the least enthusiastic person on your team… something to bear in mind when you are putting together a group of people.