Have you ever bought a piece of equipment that you thought would come in really useful only to leave it lying around for months because you could not work out how to set it up? Or not set all the features up, because it would have taken hours to read through the handbook, which looked as if it had been translated by a computer anyway?

Many individuals have experienced the state of affairs at some time or another. I had an alarm clock once that had dozens of functions like waking me up at diverse 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 recognize some voice commands, but I could not be concerned with all that.

I simply wanted it to wake me up whenever I set it. Video recorders are similar devices. How many times do you hear of individuals setting their video recorder to record a movie only to get a documentary on another channel? It used to occur a lot, did it not?

The point that I am getting at here is that the designers of these instruments 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 equipment so convoluted, a great deal of people decide not to bother using them at all and will avoid that make in the future, which is the precise opposite of what the manufacturers wanted.

The next time you go out looking for some electrical gadget, you will say to yourself: “Oh, So-And-So, you need a diploma to use one by So-And-So. I’m not buying one of those”.

So how can this concern you? Well, if you have to coordinate anything that you want others to take part in or be enthusiastic about, try not to make it overly complex. 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 be grateful to you for it, they will take no notice of your undertaking.

This has a lot of implications for on line projects where people can be hundreds of miles apart but still be working together on a joint project from home. Open source programming is a good example of this kind of work. The team leaders should keep everything as simple as possible if they want the maximum co-operation.

One technique that you can use to test to see if your project is being understood is to inquire. 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 considerate.

If you need to know more about team-building, then visit our website entitled Team Building to learn more.

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