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OPINION
Effective team management involves setting clear expectations, equipping and empowering members, and fostering engagement and evaluation. Lessons from the parenting trenches
W e all work hard to create effective teams composed of motivated people, so when an initiative or project fails it can be easy to lay blame on the team. But I suggest we take a look in the mirror first.
As a fairly newly-minted senior associate at Cyntergy, one could say my experience at people management is in its “infancy.” But I do have a lot of kids (five under the age of 8), and I’ve learned some important lessons from the parenting trenches that I think apply well to work life. So indulge me, if you will, as I lay out a proposal – the five Es for how we can best cultivate our team members: 1. Expect. Upon opening the play room door, I experience a familiar spike in blood pressure. I specifically remember telling the 5-year-old, “Clean the room before snacks,” and yet here is the room, a complete mess, and here he is, happily munching away on carrots and hummus (or, to be honest, Teddy Grahams or worse). Is he a monster? A manipulative glutton? No, he’s just a 5-year-old. And when I say, “Clean your room,” the expectation isn’t translating.
How often have we experienced something similar at work? We set the table for our teams and what comes back is not what we wanted. Queue the blood pressure spike. Are they monsters? Manipulative layabouts? No, they’re just not inside our brains. We have to learn to set better expectations: crystal clarity, good examples, and periodic checks are all essential. We can’t blame others for not doing what we didn’t effectively tell them. 2. Equip. Our family goes through two gallons of milk per week. Do you know how much milk a large Target-brand cereal bowl will hold? I do. It’s about a half-gallon. I learned this one day after instructing my eldest son to, “Get yourself a bowl of cereal so I can finish napping.” Twenty minutes later I entered the kitchen to find him on the floor spoonlessly lapping at a bowl of milk and cereal.
Sam Graves, PE
See SAM GRAVES, page 4
THE ZWEIG LETTER JULY 8, 2024, ISSUE 1544
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