by Bill Cottringer 

It is not the things in life that bothers us, but rather our opinions about these things. ~Epictetus. 

     Like efficient government, this title seems somewhat like an oxymoron. Well, I certainly didn’t come up with the idea because most highly successful people are the ones who have managed to survive a series of failures first and learned some important lessons. Thomas Eddison, Babe Ruth, and Abraham Lincoln quickly come to mind. The premise here is by embracing and understanding a failure experience, instead of denying or running from it, this reaction can offer some very valuable clues that can lead to much better success when the next opportunity avails itself.

     I have made many mistakes and experienced great disappointments from a mountain of failures, but I am still here plugging away, because I accepted my part in these failures and learned some valuable lessons moving forward. Two years ago, I was trying to get through a post-doctoral graduate certificate program in human capital leadership. I wanted to upgrade my organizational development and leadership skills for future consulting in non-profit organizations, a new career after 55 years of criminal justice work. One of the last classes was my favorite topic of team building. All the classes were interesting, but this one was at the top.

   The whole program and this class were filled with much younger military officers and non-coms. They were much quicker mentally and more tech savvy than this 80-year-old guy, even though I did Internet chats through DoD before they had windows and even before that with key punching a 3 X 12 perforated card for the huge mainframe to read. Ironically, I was way ahead of other students with a nearly perfect 100% cumulative score going into this last class, so I was really looking forward to a strong finish. My personal philosophy has always been to cooperate with others, while competing against myself.

    At the beginning of the team building class, I thought the teacher was one of the worst I had in all my five prior college degrees; but at the end, I realized he was probably one of the best for what he taught me. Early in the class, we were broken up into teams of four, with the topic of how to best function as a team for satisfaction, efficiency, and productivity. We then chose communication as the key to all this, and I started gathering good articles on communication and team building within government and business organizations for our team to consider.

    But then, we were suddenly thrown a curve ball by the professor. He assigned all the teams the project of evaluating holacracy as an alternative model of organizational development, given the traditional pyramid hierarchical structure. Well, needless to say, nobody in the class even knew what this term meant, and everybody scrambled in a panic. I openly expressed my dissatisfaction with this perceived change, because of all the time and effort I put into getting and reading articles about better communication in teams and organizations. All out the window and having to start over with a one-line instruction. In retrospect, the teacher was force-training us on the importance of agility and adaptability, needed for organizational leaders to survive today’s world of volatility, uncertainty, change and ambiguity. Believe me, the whole class felt this pain. But nothing compared to the “Netflixing” Blockbuster got!

    Being an intrinsically motivated self-starter myself and not wanting to waste any more time, I got busy finding out more about this strange holacracy term and shared my initial findings with my team. I even found that a government agency here in my home state of Washington was experimenting with holacracy. That is all it took for them to vote me in as the voluntary team leader for this project. Our challenge was for the team to write a 10-page research article evaluating the pros and cons of the holacracy model with current research references and then a 10-page written and oral PPT presentation with all our findings. So far so good, even with having to start all over again. At least I already had a good PPT template going to fill in the new information.

    But there really wasn’t enough time for our team to meet and agree upon who would do what and despite frequent organizational and instructional postings from me to the other team members, nothing much was getting done. I began to feel a big failure coming on in not being able to produce the expected deliverables to the professor. To make a long story short, I ended up doing most of the work myself and shared the glory so others would all get the top grade from the excellent article and PPT presentation. I never shared the lack of other’s contributions to this team building project, and if the lawyer professor in the next class in ethics would have known this, I probably wouldn’t have gotten the only 100% grade on my paper about the odious IRS blunder in granting known hate groups, tax-exempt non-profit status, which he ever awarded.

    Here are the valuable lessons I learned about virtual communication and team building from this recent infamous failure of mine.

1. We can never take enough time to get team members to know each other well enough to communicate well and build the trust necessary for effective team building to occur. It is a good idea to build a practical “charter” for the team to learn each other’s’ availability, limitations, skills, communication preferences, knowledge levels and other personal information they wish to share, in order to help speed this process along. The importance of taking the time to do this cannot be over-emphasized enough.

2. Virtual communication is much more difficult than F2F communication. There are no facial clues hinting of clarity vs. confusion, agreement vs. disagreement or understanding vs. misunderstanding and we can’t assume any messages are viewed and interpreted as written or intended. We also have to tell others as to the ways in which we like to be communicated, as well as learning their preferences. This all takes lots of time, patience and willingness.

3. Every team building journey involves getting past the inevitable conflict that comes in to play with the individual differences of team members. Conflict causes stress and stress always impedes communication, and this especially true with virtual communication. The best conflict resolution skills are required, and these involve a driving attitude of cooperation, collaboration, and compromise. And this takes trust, which is difficult to develop through virtual communication and team building. An openness to sharing vulnerabilities can go a long way here.