I have been working over recent months in various teams on contracts. One stands out because it clearly has all the best people. You ask a question or seek some input and it is understood, thought about and responded to quickly and comprehensively. This is because the “A Team” is on board. By contrast on another project the wrong documents are used, meetings never happen and developing any schedules is really hard work.
 
If I was asked to give one general piece of advice to a potential customer for an outsourcing contract it would be to make sure that the A team and not the B team is properly engaged in the procurement negotiation and in the service implementation and delivery. Then even if there are issues, and there often can be with complex services, you can be sure they will be resolved if at all possible.
 
Jim Collins in Good to Great said that you have to get the right people on the bus. Although he was primarily concerned with developing businesses he commented “First who, then what: ‘It’s not just a business principle, it’s a life principle.’” He also said “Great vision without great people is irrelevant.”
 
I also like this article on How to Build an A Team which comments Those who aspire to be successful quickly realize that individual performance isn’t usually enough. Only a team of committed individuals can accomplish great things. So a leader’s job turns to finding, selecting, and cultivating an amazing team.
 
The intriguing thing about teams is that players in the B team can be developed so they become able to be the A team. For several years I managed my son’s football team which was the C team in their age group for a club playing in a local league. When we started we had players who were overweight, players who couldn’t run, one who couldn’t breathe properly and a goalkeeper whose mother stood by the goal posts to comfort him as the goals flowed in. For a year we didn’t win a game, but then we trained harder at a passing game, discovered a winger who eventually became a county sprinter (he just ran past all of the opposition and delivered the ball into the penalty area – where we might or might not score) and recruited a few key players. We started winning and became a successful if not title winning team.
 
As Henry Ford said “Coming Together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.”
 
This Harvard Business School Article The Tough Work of Turning Around a Teamgives perhaps a more professional view on the challenges of improving a team in the NFL.
 
Ultimately it is about getting the right people motivated to do the right things. Andrew Carnegie the 19thcentury Scottish-American industrialist, business magnate, and philanthropist sums this topic up well Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision. The ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organizational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results.
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Continuing, for regular readers, with last week’s tree clearing saga today I loaded all of the (large and heavy) segments of tree trunk into my car on a protective tarpaulin and took them down to the nearest tip (now recycling plant). I staggered from my car to the garden skip with 5 substantial bits of the tree trunk and various smaller branches. Just as I was finishing one of the tip workers came up, took the now empty tarpaulin out of the car and shook out the leftover leaves and twigs. This was a nice gesture and I thanked him – but it did occur to me that he could have been more helpful with the earlier heavy lifting!
 
Helping people is a great thing to do, when they want help and you can genuinely provide it. A former partner of mine at a law firm told me how when he had been a junior lawyer working at 1am in the morning in a city law firm a partner on his way home asked why he was there so late. He then sat down, removed his coat and helped his junior colleague to complete his task and at least get some sleep that night.
 
It’s not actually that easy a topic. This Harvard Business Review article “How to Get the Help You Need”commences with the observation Few of us enjoy asking for help. As research in neuroscience and psychology shows, the social threats involved—the uncertainty, risk of rejection, potential for diminished status, and inherent relinquishing of autonomy—activate the same brain regions that physical pain does.
 
It goes on to explain how we all need help in the workplace these days where Cross-functional teams, agile project management techniques, matrixed or hierarchy-minimizing structures, and increasingly collaborative office cultures require you to constantly push for the cooperation and support of your managers, peers, and employees – and suggests ways of effectively seeking assistance.
 
Maybe on reflection I should have saved my back and asked for help earlier at the tip! It also seems to be important for organisations and for ourselves to provide help.
 
This Forbes article “10 Ways To Help Others That Will Lead You To Success” proposes that  Helping others should be a natural extension of every business leader’s responsibilities and provides some ideas on how to do this.
 
While a CBS commentary “Doing small acts of kindness may lower your stress”  cites a Yale and UCLA study where "The take-home message is that when we are stressed and we help others, we can also end up helping ourselves.”
 
Abraham Lincoln once said “He has a right to criticize, who has a heart to help” while a later president of the United States Ronald Reagan commented “We can’t help everyone, but everyone can help someone.”
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​I had the afternoon all planned. I have really got behind with outdoor chores this year and was facing some derogatory comments from the family about the state of the front garden. So, the weather forecast was good – no rain and not too hot, and everybody else was going out. I could finally trim the hedge and tidy the paths and collect so left-over leaves and make the front of the house look far more respectable.
 
However, for some reason I had to go to the back of the rear garden first, only to find that a large twenty-foot tree trunk covered in ivy had been blown over and jammed itself across a wooden arch I had installed in the spring. So all my best laid plans had to change. The tree wasn’t safe and my arch might collapse. I therefore spent 3 hours with a chain saw cutting the tree up and clearing up all the branches. The front garden remains in its current rather sorry state at least until next week.
 
It’s true in professional life as well. The best laid plans don’t always work out. You fly to a meeting in Scotland on a negotiation, only to find the lawyer or commercial adviser on the other side isn’t available for the meeting. This happened to a colleague of mine a few years ago. The trick is recognising that this might happen and doing something instead. I think my colleague spent some useful time with his own team finding out what was really going on in face to face meetings while he was there.
 
Murphy’s law says what can go wrong will go wrong. Or maybe as Spike Milligan put it We haven’t got a plan so nothing can go wrong!I think it’s how we prepare for the unexpected and react to the change of circumstances that matters. This Guardian article suggests Four ways to cope when things go wrong at work and comments that the key is resilience in the face of hardship – some weather storms with little or no effect on their efficiency or sense of wellbeing.
 
This Computer Weekly article Managing IT projects: when things go wrongdiscusses the unexpected events that almost inevitably disrupt many IT projects quoting Harold Macmillan, British Prime Minister in the 1950s, who when asked by a journalist what he most feared replied, "Events, dear boy, events".
 
This article on what successful people do when things go wrong quotes Winston Churchill who summed up the challenges of dealing with the unexpected with a positive twist “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”  It also comments that Bill Gates’ first company called Traf-O-Data was a failure. He was able to adapt and try again with Microsoft and we all know how successful that is. 
 
So the real lesson is that things will go wrong and plans will have to change and we just need to react and deal with the challenges that inevitably creates – I suppose I had at least had the foresight to possess a chain saw.
 
And as Albert Einstein said In the middle of every difficulty lies opportunity. Probably won’t stop my back hurting from lifting tree trunks though!

​As we move seamlessly from an over hot July into a baking August, where travelling anywhere can be challenging, I find myself drawn again to the theme of the virtual versus the actual world in professional working life and in particular business meetings and conferences.
 
Bearing in mind what actually getting people together in one location for a conference, or to work on a specific project, actually costs in terms of time and travel and personal inconvenience, surely we are better off with some combination of Skype (with videos of course), IM, email, text and even old fashioned telephone calls – plus whatever AI, virtual reality and robotics process automation can bring to this particular party.
 
Meetings generally as I research the topic seem to get a bad press. As James T Kirk the fictional captain of the Starship Enterprise once said A meeting is an event where minutes are taken and hours wasted.
 
And of course in the future we might never have to attend a meeting in person at all – see this articleI came across about our “Digital Twin” where:
 
Early adopters of technology could soon be able to send a digital stand-in to attend face-to-face conferences. The participant’s digital twin would be a software incarnation of the person embodied (or not) by a hologram or device that can see, hear, and observe the event in real time.
 
However, is this right? I get that meetings will be supported by technology and conferences will aided and enhanced by apps, but there are occasions where real face to face encounters really add value. I have just spent most of this week co-located in a suite of offices working on a project – and it really mattered to be able to go into the next room and ask a question of a subject matter expert or bring them into your room to solve a problem.  
 
This industry report on The Future of Meetingscomes to some interesting conclusions that support the continuation of face to face conferences and meetings, but with their nature changing using technology so participants become more interactive rather than just passive listeners to talking head speakers. 
 
A plethora of online meetings take place all over the world, however it has not disrupted the core desire of people to interact face to face. Four in five respondents (86%) believe that attendees will continue to place a strong importance on meeting face to face.
 
and
 
Audiences went from wanting passive experiences in which they were listeners, to wanting to be active participants; learning and applying what is being taught to them.
 
The report also uses a word I had never seen before voluntourism giving attendees an opportunity to experience the local culture and give back to the community as part of the meeting. I have certainly experienced this attending and speaking at, for example, ITechLawconferences around Europe where you learn about cutting edge developments in IT law, network with other delegates and get to know the local law firms in the country hosting the event.
 
Leading figures from politics to sport espouse the value of true meetings. Tiger Woods observed: The amount of meetings I've been in – people would be shocked. But that's how you gain experience, how you can gain knowledge, being in meetings and participating. You learn and grow.
 
While Hilary Clinton commented: I could sit in my office and do videoconferences nearly anywhere in the world, but because that is so easy, people actually expect you to show up more, to make the effort and demonstrate the respect, to sit across the table and look eye-to-eye.
 
Maybe the best last word on the subject comes from the American investor Warren Buffet: You will never see eye-to-eye if you never meet face-to-face.