Team work makes the dream work

I haven't posted much in the past month because I have I spent the past number of days and weeks working on two very important presentations / efforts. The entire experience has crystallized (or crystallised, because we had to use British English in the presentation, and that, in itself, was an experience) what incredible work that a solid, well-oiled team can do together.

My story about this experience starts with the presentation itself. In a former role, I led a deal team, a large part of which was responsible for helping our IBM teams present in a more innovative and engaging way. My task on one of these two efforts presentation was to do just that - figure out how to create a story that both somewhat made sense in terms of what we were presenting, when we were given a list of essentially randomly organized questions to present.

Accordingly, when given this challenge to tackle, my first call was to someone who I've done this with a bunch of times (hi Aaron!), who is a pro at this in his own right. Working on this with him over the past week was awesome and incredible; albeit, I won't count out loud the number of hours that we worked on this. In addition to Aaron, there was a broader team who has worked together for a number of years and so Aaron and I inserted ourselves into an existing team dynamic. Having done this a time or two, I can tell you that an awesome team creating the presentation can't do it without an awesome team delivering the presentation -- and so all together, we were able to make something wonderful happen, and have a lot of laughs, even in the face of really demanding and long hours.

It really led me to reflect on how important it is to leverage teams who have worked together before and who know each other well to help accelerate work; it's amazing how much we got done in a short period of time.

It also led me to reflect on how important being in person together is to accelerate that dynamic. As we were trying to pull together some of the presentation remotely, we often got into some heated discussions about what should be included or how we should present the materials; not that there weren't heated conversations in person, but it's a lot harder to be mad at someone when you are sitting next to them. When Johnny and I went to pre-Cana (Catholic pre-marriage counseling), one of the exercises was a marriage counselor came in and gave us tricks to diffuse tension / conflict; the biggest suggestion was that when you are the most mad at each other, hold hands. Being together from a work perspective is the holding hands equivalent of a marriage fight.

I think virtual collaboration tools like Slack and WebEx have gone a long way in making remote work even more effective - but there is nothing like an experienced team working together to get something done.

I also have one quick tangent: for this presentation, I spent the past week in the UK, and I can't tell you how many people (men and women alike) asked me, "so if you are here, what is Charlie doing?" or "Are your moms' helping with Charlie while you are gone?" It's a well meaning question with somewhat insulting undertones about Johnny's ability or propensity to care for our daughter. We talk a lot about making women more successful and driving more diversity at work; a big part of that is accepting from a social perspective, that men are equally capable of caring for and loving their children as women. I can guarantee that the question has NEVER been asked of a Dad "So if you are here, what is your child doing?" - obviously the child is being cared for by the mother. Speaking for my own family, Johnny is incredible with Charlie and does an awesome job, both when I have to travel for work, and every single day, being an equal parent to Charlie.

So, thanks to awesome teams and an awesome husband, I'm super proud of everything that we accomplished in the past week. Team work really does make the dream work.