One of the most commonly asked questions in every job Interview especially here in Nigeria is ...
Are you a team player?
And to paraphrase it further the question might come as ...
Do you work well with other people?
This is because building a solid team is paramount for the growth of any organisation especially organizations that are majorly on sales. How these teams function will either make or mar the growth and productivity of the company.
All hands have to be on deck as everyone have to wear their creative caps and think about the strategies on how to bring money to the company. It's not always easy especially during the meeting of team managers as each manager want to prove that he or she has a better idea that will bring better result.
Talking about result, the purpose of every team is to produce results. You can have all the meetings, ideas and plan all you can, without good results, there is no moving forward.
Managing people is not always easy as each may have contrasting ideas and deciding on which one to go with is always daring and dicey. There is always this fear of regretting not taking the other person's idea or decision. Other times you just want to avoid making the other people feel unappreciated or making their idea look stupid and by jeez there are days when all the ideas placed on the table are just too good to overlook any.
So in this situation, we jump right into all of them and find a way to bring positive results from all of them. Sometimes they will all work to our favour, other times it will backfire and bring us back to that fear of - Had I known.
One of the occasion when these contrasting ideas backfired back to us was when we added about five new members to the team and we were to take them all, including the old team members to the site for some inspection. It wasn't easy to decide on which vehicles to take to the site and which not to take as everyone has one or two reasons why his or her suggestion should be taken. I had suggested we take sequire jeep to the site because it's more spacious and can survive the bad road leading to the site. The marketing head didn't quiet agree with me as he stated the cost implication of going to the site with the sequire jeeps. To fill each of them is going to cost forty-five thousand naira and three of them will be taking up to A hundred and thirty five thousand naira. To him, we have to manage cost to the barest minimum. He suggested we take the Honda accord instead. It was like the battle of the Vikings and at the end it was agreed that we combine the two. On our way to the site, the Honda broke down. They have to manage it till they locate a mechanic and we thought that it will take like thirty minutes to fix but it took hours. We have to first drop the people inside the jeep at the site before sending the driver back to the mechanic to pick up the other people. This delayed what we want to achieve in the site and at the end of the day we were not able to do much.
The diversity in opinions have in many times also worked in our favour and one of such occasions was when we planned to go to four points by Sheraton hotel for a very big event. Kelvin came up with his own plan about Eko hotel that it's better to go to Eko hotel instead of the other one. His reason was that there was a very powerful event that will take place on that same day and the company will not want to miss it. We went back and forth on which one to attend. It was really a mighty dilemma for the whole team . At the end we decided to attend both event and to do this we have to figure out a way to make it work. The only way ofcourse is to share the team into two. One team will be at Four points by Sheraton while the other will be at Eko Hotel. Both event turned out to be a success as no one complained or regretted attending the event they were assigned to. Infact the whole mission for attending the events were all over-accomplished.
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