Have you ever bought an item of equipment that you thought would come in very useful only to leave it lying around for months because you could not figure out how to set it up? Or not set all the features up, because it would have taken hours to read through the manual, which looked as if it had been translated by a computer anyway?
Most individuals have undergone the situation at some time or another. I had an alarm clock some time ago that had dozens of functions like waking me up at different times on the weekend to during the week and arbitrarily choosing a radio channel every day to wake me up. It also had a feature with which I could train it to understand some voice commands, but I could not be concerned with all that.
I just wanted it to wake me up whenever I set it. Video recorders are similar items. How many times do you hear of people setting their video recorder to record a film only to get a soap opera on another channel? It used to occur a lot, didn’t it?
The point that I am getting at here is that the designers of these machines have been told to put as many functions as possible into them up to a price in order to be all things to all people. However, in making their machines so complicated, a great deal of people decide not to bother using them at all and will avoid that make in the future, which is the exact opposite of what the manufacturers intended.
The next time you go out looking for some electrical implement, you will say to yourself: “Oh, So-And-So, you need a diploma to use one by So-And-So. I’m not getting one of those”.
So how can this affect you? Well, if you have to organize anything that you want others to take part in or be enthusiastic about, try not to make it overly complicated. I am not saying ‘dumb-down’, just don’t show off by putting all the bells and whistles on it simply to show that you can do that. People will not thank you for it, they will take no notice of your undertaking.
This has a lot of implications for on line projects where individuals can be thousands of miles apart but still be working together on a joint development from home. Open source programming is a good example of this type of work. The team leaders should keep everything as simple as possible if they want the maximum co-operation.
One way that you can use to test to see if your venture is being understood is to ask. It sounds self-evident and it should be, but a lot of team leaders will not ask because they think that it makes them look weak and unknowledgable. Again, in fact, the opposite is the case. A good team leader is not a despot; a good team leader is a good organizer and is thoughtful.
If you want to learn more about team-building, then visit our website called Team Building to learn more.