Currently I am a full-time student and work full time in Career Development & Computer Instruction with the dolls as a side line that I have not devoted time to very much in the last year or so. In addition to this I also have 2 kids.
Working in the fields I am currently in I am part of a team. This team has changed drastically in the last year. It has gone from being a two person Career Development Center to having 6-8 of us working together to help an ever growing client base.
A couple of the most important things that have happened are team members transitioning on and off of the team and one of the team members being promoted. One of the main team members transitioned to a new job and she did a lot of work for the team in job development and community contacts for each client that walked through the door. With her gone it has fallen to other team members to do the same things. We're managing and becoming good at what she did.
The promotion of one of our peers to a supervisory position has been a bit rough, as well, as no one really wanted to communicate. This brings me to my point about teams and team members and leadership. Communication is key. If you do not know your team mates then you do not know who can do special tasks. Our new supervisor is learning this the hard way but has finally realized that to build an effective team he needed to get to know his team as individuals.
I am starting to see the glimmer of potential that the team has if he can get to know his team members and start to use their skills to their full potential. Thankfully he's worked closely with me for nearly a year now and I've moved into a position that is starting to use my skills and develop my new skills I'm gaining as a student. He's also been actively seeking information from me to manage the team better which is a good thing as he learns quickly and applies things quickly.
The team is developing well..... now if only he'd stop trying to have full team meetings and just stick with individual meetings and be happy when we can manage to get together as a larger group. Once he does this the team will move forward and become great.
I think one of the most important things he's learned is that there has to be communication and trust for a team to truly function well. One of the best things we could have done is to setup Google Notebooks to house notes about what we do and things we've learned. I think it has the potential to bring the team closer together or at least give us a resource to go to if we need to know something.
I am back to looking forward to working again as the latest transition is finally coming to an end... of course there is something new right around the corner but the rough team transitions are nearly done... for a while.
