Transcripts
1. Introduction: Team working is a
very messy process. It's not one of
those processes that are simple in the real world. In the real-world, there's
egos that are involved. There's deadlines that
risk being missed. And there is a lot of miscommunication that
typically happens when you gather a bunch of
human beings into one location for
one shared goal. The purpose of this
class is to give you a beginner's guide on how
to team work effectively. In this class, you're going to understand the
value of teamwork. You're going to
understand, sometimes it's better to just
work by herself. And you're going to learn
the palm technique, along with a lot of innovative
frameworks that will help you collaborate
with others much better. If you're ready to level
up your teamwork game. I look forward to
seeing you inside.
2. Value of Teamworking: The reason that team working
is very important is because at times we don't
have all the answers. We need to reach out
for help because someone else has the
answers that we need. Let's talk about
computers real quick. Did you know that
computers used to be used strictly for computation? That was the main use of it. Can this computer add
one plus one into two? It can. Wow, this is so amazing. Eventually the
computer started to get more and more advanced. And as it got more advanced, it went from a
computational device into a communications device. Nowadays, imagine if
there's a guy named Peter who wants to learn
more about biology, and there's another guy named Johannes who knows a
lot about biology. Johanas has all this research
paper in his computer, uh, talking about biology. And he's like, I'll give others who wants
to learn about biology. Are all these research
papers for only $5? Suddenly a D computers being
great communication devices, allows multiple parties to win. And likewise, if you
are someone who is great in terms of a
certain skill set, your skill set of biology, then it will be
beneficial to you if you can share that
message with other people. And likewise, a lot of
people also know biology. And I'm hoping you're
picking up the analogies of course, of their life. If you can tap into
that information, they will help you out, especially when you are
team working with them. So the main value of teamworking is that
it turns human beings from computational devices
into communication devices.
3. Why Teamworking is Hard: The reason team working is difficult is for a few reasons. Number one, we were never taught proper frameworks
in regards to it. I don't know, but
for you, but for me when I was a little kid, I would have the
teachers be like, Okay, you guys gather in groups and then we will
begin the assignment. And they will spend a long time explaining
how to do the assignment, but not explaining how to work
with the different people. For me, I was very
shy growing up. So me being surrounded
with all these people. I didn't like it. Added to this, there was at least one to two people who are trying to
battle for power. And me being shy along with other people who weren't as shy. But they weren't as forceful
as those two accreted a very weird dynamic and
everything just fell off. It seemed like we
were trying to get a square pegs and stick
it in a circle hole. And the entire process
was uncomfortable. So one of the reasons that team working is very difficult is because our child's
sides never go away. Especially in a group setting. Every now and then,
there's different members who are very shy
like a younger man. And there are other members
who want a lot of attention. They want to call the shots. And it's difficult to
work in that dynamic. So simply understanding
that team working is not going to be
easy from the get-go. Surprisingly, it gives
you a sense of calm at this painful truth
allows you to feel like, okay, well, I guess I'm not off for thinking that
this is difficult. There's this guy
that's telling me that it's supposed
to be difficult. And this is just
the way that it is. However, with difficulty
comes a great opportunity. The opportunity is that we get to a flux or social skills. A smooth sea never
created a skilled sailor. And likewise, similar
personalities never built social skills. So use this as an opportunity to practice team working
abilities so you maintain your composure for future interactions where
you have to teamwork.
4. Working Solo: The first step in
order to become a better team worker is to understand when not to teamwork. This is the biggest
cheat code out there. And this is something
that you're probably finding to be a
little counter-intuitive. This guy is telling
me that the class is on the value of teamworking. And suddenly he's telling me that I have to know
when not to teamwork. It sounds like an oxymoron. No. It's actually
highly practical. Because if you're one of
those individuals that are always trying to
collaborate with others, then there's that level of desperate attitude that
you give towards others. But if you understand, No, this is a project that
I can do by myself. Or how about I just
asked the question, Is this a project that
requires teamwork? In this simple
question allows you to open the paradigm of no, I can actually do this
by myself or I can acquire the skills
in order to do this. So I could benefit
myself into the future. Nowadays, when you are
actually teamworking, there's this level of
composers that you have because you realize
that you do need them. It's not just a waste of time. Have you ever had one
of those moments where there's these meetings
that you're entering and the person who held the meeting is just hosting it for the
sake of hosting it. So what happens? There's a bunch of
people that are just being forced to talk. And as they are being
forced to talk, there's a lot of clutter that's
forcefully being created. The meeting was supposed to add clarity, but unfortunately, it's taking away clarity because the meeting person
never asked the question. Is this meeting mandatory? So one of the main takeaways you want to get out
of this video is to understand that there are a lot of projects that
are best done solo. And if you cannot do it solo, that is when you want
to add an teamwork eg.
5. Palm Technique: For the sake of
clarity in this video, I'm going to assume that
you are picking up the role as the head honchos of the
teamworking experiment. You are putting yourself
in a position of power. And here's the thing. A lot of times when human beings are being gathered together, most of the people, 75 to 85% of them are
looking around like, Okay, well, who's going
to lead the charge? Most people, despite
how vocal they are, they don't really
want to be a leader. So take some opportunity to watch this entire
course and be like, I want to be the leader. Once you make that commitment. Now, you want to
understand your palms. Look at your palm real quick. There's five different
fingers within the palm. You, as the holder of the palm, you view all these fingers
as different and the same. At the same time. Write your thumb is
different than your pinky. Your pinky is different
than your ring finger, and so on and so on. Likewise, when you imagine managing a different
group of people, what you want to do
is you want to view them as fingers, okay? Each individual has
a certain skill set that they are very competent n. And if you can find the right
skill set for them, then your entire team working journey is going
to be much easier. What you don't want
to do is try to force a pinky to be a thumb and the thumb to be
the middle finger. So here's how this
works in practice. Typically, when there
are group situations, you'll see that one person and they don't really like
the details too much. They don't like to
sit down and play with the Excel sheets
or anything like that. They're very great
at communicating. They love talking. So just make a
mental note of that, okay, this person loves to talk. What about this person? This person really doesn't say much in the meetings at all. You have to force this
person to say something. But look at this person
and they're always due to link something
in their journal. They seem to be very creative. But look at the way
that they're dressed. Yes, they're very creative. Now, if you could talk
to this person more, this may be a person who
is amazing at PowerPoints. So now you make
another mental note. You're like, Okay,
well this person, Hey, are you good at
PowerPoint by any chance? Well, I love PowerPoints. I can make it look amazing. I could do the animation, I could do graphics, and
I could do so much more. Boom, another mental note. And then you just keep
taking some time to assess what someone's strengths are along with someone's weaknesses. And then you start to
view people correctly. The better that you're capable of viewing people correctly. The morning, you as a maestro, you're capable of organizing them under one shared mission.
6. Shared Mission: Once you've taken some time to identify the different
fingers and the palm, you want to now create a
shared mission that will unite the different fingers
and allow them to understand that they
are a part of a palm. There was this guy
named Steve Jobs. I'm sure if you've
heard of them. Once he got fired
from Apple initially, he started another
company called Next. And within next, he took
some time to identify the different
fingers and the palm of the people that
he was hiring. And once he identified them, he took them on a retreat. Within the retreat, he kept on hammering home the
mission for next. And he explained why
he was doing this. Why was it consistently
just repeating the same mission over again
and again for a few reasons. One reason is when
you don't keep on reminding people of
the shared mission. That's when a lot of the
people within the team, they start to major in
the minors and they completely forget what
they're really working for. Another reason,
he kept repeating the main mission
of next over and over was because it became the spirit that added
life into these fingers. You, as the headmaster of the team that you are
currently organizing a, you have to find that
right mission for you. I can't quite state this
for you because I don't know the project that you're
working in a team for. But the more that you
are taking the effort to distill this hazy vision into a clarified vision that
you can use with words. The more that you want
to keep on repeating it over and over and over again. And the more that
you do, the more that the different people in the team then no longer just working for
their self-interests. Instead, they're working
for the greater good. And understand this. The more that they
are working for the greater good a division, the more that they are building
this level of patients, they're more than willing to go through the ups and downs of the project because they feel connected with the
person next to them. Did you notice that where when there's a group project where you guys are all speaking
the same language. I don't really mind that this person breeds
so loud next to you. If you did not have that
shared mission, we like. Now why did this
guy breed so loud? Why did this person
chooses allowed? All these people
are annoying me. This is the mindset
of someone who is a middle finger and just views themselves
as a middle finger, but doesn't understand that
they're connected to a pump. But on the flip
side, the leader, the headmaster of the team, that keeps repeating
the vision over and over from creative ways. You don't just want to say the exact words like a
parrot the entire time. You keep saying it
in different ways. That sparks these different
people's imagination. The more that this
middle finger is like. Well, I'm not just
a middle finger. Instead, all of us
are a part of a palm. This is a very, very important step to turn
these little objective tasks into something that engages the different people's
subjective experience. So I find that
mission and just keep repeating it over and
over and over again.
7. Deadlines and Communication: So you've identified the
correct roles for the people. You're taking some time
to keep on repeating the shared mission from
multiple different angles. Now, it comes down to
deadlines and communication. You, as the headmaster, you have to take some time to
create the right deadlines. And we're not taking
this top-down approach. Instead, it's a
collaborative effort. Hey, Suzy, when can you
have the PowerPoint? I don't buy. Great. Hey Peter. One, can you have the mock presentation
done by okay, great. And let me know if
anything needs to change. By the way, things are going
to need to change a lot. That's just how it works
in terms of a teamworking. You as a leader, you need to take some
time to understand that. People will often
tell you one thing. But human nature creeps in. Laziness, creeps in.
Every now and then, the personal problems kick in. And you need to assume that
things can always go wrong. And this is why you're
going to create hopefully a shared group, a
communication system, which is another
fancy phrase for a WhatsApp Telegram or a group name where you guys can
constantly communicate. The more debt you guys
have this central base. When you can communicate, the more debt, you
are always updated. And hopefully you're
still repeating the mission over and over and
giving these people hope. That says, look, we're
almost at, at the deadline. Keep on going, guys
were doing great. So from this video, I want you to understand that deadlines are
very important. I get that from the different people that
you're working with. And then I want you to assume
that human nature will creep in every now and
then the deadlines or may, or may not be met. So to alleviate this problem, I create a central
database where you guys can
communicate with ease.
8. Bonus Tip: Physical Visualization of Goal: So bonus tip is to
visualize your goals. See, there was this one year when I was in the final year of electrical engineering
and I was doing a thing called the
senior design project. I was working with a two
Justin's and a guy named Greg. And we all have
different personalities. They were family man. They were much older than I was I was I would say 21 or 22. They were in their 30s and 40s. So the senior design project was a priority in
terms of school, but they had other
priorities as well. And we were very disorganized. One day I go to my senior
project advisor or Dr. Takeshi. I was like, It seems like we
all have different agendas. What can we do in
order to unite us? And that's when he
recommended that I do a thing called
the Gantt chart. So I googled it. And this is a chart
where you get to visualize the goals and you can see exactly what
someone is responsible for. There's different colors. You can use bars and everything. And it allows for a
lot of flexibility. So I studied as much as I
could about the Gantt chart. Then I went to my project
team and I was like, Hey guys, I think
we should try out this Gantt chart, which we did. And once we did
this Gantt chart, what happened was
all four of us, we're now seeing the
same exact thing because a lot of times when
we're working in a team, we're saying a lot
of the same things. But within our mind, we're
seeing something different. But in this case, we're all seeing the
same exact Gantt chart. And we wanted to
make sure that we were moving along smoothly. Suddenly, this project became a central piece in
all of our lives. So this was during undergrad. Later on when I
started my career. There was this one
time I went to New Jersey and I
was in training. And as I was in training, I had a little re-mix to
the senior design project. In this one, we had a training project where
everyone in the classroom, we got organized
into groups of four. And then we had a project
that we had to work on. And this time we were
introduced to a thing called the Scrum board, right? This is a board where we
would create our goal. We would create a
bunch of deadlines. Then we would have a bunch of sticky notes with todo items. And as we were getting
the sticky notes, once again, we're seeing the goal, the
project, everything. And once again, what happened was we were all seeing stuff
in our minds individually. But this scrum board united us. There was that level of feeling, that level of camaraderie as we got a sticky note and took it to the next side of the deadline indicating that we're
progressing forward. And there was this
shared feeling once we would rip apart, certain sticky
notes will be like, this is no longer
needed for the project. So the main takeaway
from both of these scenarios
was that it's very important to see the goal because in our
subjective reality, we're all seeing
different things. But when we have, let's say something like a
Gantt chart or a Scrum board. Now the different members of the team are all seeing
the same exact thing. And the more that they see it, the more they feel
united with one another.
9. Final Project: For the final
project, your goal is to assemble a team yourself. You could choose the project
and you could choose the amount of people
within the team. You need three people. Do you need five people? Are you going camping, creating a potluck,
organizing a surprise party. Choose the team members
or choose the project. And then we're going to do the formula that we
discussed in this class. One, find the right
fingers within the palm, which means a find the right roles for the
people within the team. To. You want to have a
vision that will inspire everyone and you want to keep
on repeating this vision. And three, you want to have deadlines plus ongoing
communication. The ongoing communication
can happen in GroupMe, Facebook, group, Telegram,
whatever, and have deadlines. So these other people are aware. They have their
own lives to you. Now, if you want to even
take it a level further, you can introduce a Gantt chart or a Scrum board yourself. Once you are done with
this shared mission, I want you to create a report, a sharing your experience. How's it like
assembling the team? Was it easy funding the
right roles for them? How was it like having
ongoing communication? Did you guys build some sort
of commodity along the way? Get as detailed as
you possibly can. Create this report I posted on the final project
section right below. I look forward to reading it. If you enjoyed this beginner's
class on teamworking, and you want to
understand more about the philosophy of the
Armani talks brand. Or be sure to check out
our money talks.com, which has plenty of Maya blogs, YouTube videos,
podcasts, and much more. Money, talks.com. Go on, check it out.
Arman Chowdhury, Confidence thru Communication
