Helpful Ideas...

I love my work. I enjoy what I'm doing and I do it well. I'm a computer instructor. There are days when I really love what I'm doing and then there are days that drive me batty. This week was a batty week but it's fine by me as I know that I am helping society by teaching skills that are fast becoming necessary to survive in the workplace.

Every workplace has frustrations and mine is no exception. Bosses who are out on vacation or who drop last minute projects or meetings on a week when you think there's a chance you can catch up with lab maintenance. Thankfully my boss who does drop things on me at the last minute will negotiate time to do these things if they are truely necessary or desired. He loves the efficent office and thrives on the fact that his employees want to take the initiative to do other dutes even when not assigned.

My point I think I'm trying to make is that no matter what your frustrations at work there are worse places you could work with ananl retentive, controlling and abusive bosses who do not appreciate the hard work and do not even notice that you are there. I'm lucky and I hope you are too in your choice of workplace.

Working in a Team Environment

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.

Good Idea....

If you're anything like me you can come up with great ideas at odd times and once you get rolling with the idea you start to forget details as you get more and more excited about it (well it happens to me so I'm guessing it happens to others!)

A good solution is a secretary taking notes for you but as small business owners who can actually afford that? Next best thing a tape recorder. They come in all shapes and sizes and can record everything from a reminder to do something like an entry in your bookkeeping to the latest brilliant idea you want to try for your business to thoughts for where to take your business and how to expand it. Iit can also capture a group brainstorming session where you get to the point of bouncing ideas so fast you know you can't write them down fast enough!

Other ideas for it can include talking to it while you develop a new product. How you do something if you have to write instructions or think you'll forget in 6 months how you did something and need to repeat it.

Another idea is while working on your website, have someone go through page by page and comment on the page with their ideas along with while coming up with ideas for new pages you can create lists for keywords, page title possibilities and other behind the scenes type info you'll need when you actually start the page.

Once you're done with a brainstorming session you can then rewind and play the tape and either write or type up your idea lists in some semblance of order and get all the little things you might otherwise have forgotten. I tend to organize things in Power Point with one main idea per page and details listed below for each subject.

Hope this inspires and helps someone!