Teamwork is Learned

We all know that teamwork is important.  When a team is functioning as it should, it is a thing of beauty.  Each member knows what their job is and performs it flawlessly in conjunction with other members of the team.  A team may consist of several, or it might just be two individuals that work well together like this pair of Redbone Coonhounds.

I don't recall what these two were focused on when this photo was made, but I suspect it was an opossum.  There was one that lived in a thicket of trees just across the fence you see in the background.  The hounds would raise a ruckus whenever it made an appearance -- unless they were in stalking mode such as in this photo.  Then they would go silent, muscles tense, poised to pounce at the first opportunity.

One day as I worked from my home office, the noise of their frustration made it difficult for me to concentrate on the project on which I was working.  I walked out back and found the opossum hissing at them from the top of the fence.  I decided to end the stalemate and found a stick with which to knock the snarling varmint from his perch.  When he hit the ground, the dogs pounced -- one to the head, the other to the middle -- and the stalemate ended.

The way the dogs worked together was a thing of beauty.

I'm sure there will be people who take offence to the fact I aided the dogs in their quest to end the earthly sojourn of this tick-eating marsupial.  To them I would argue that I only sped the inevitable.  Those dogs were bent on making it happen if they had to learn how to climb that fence to complete the task.

For a number of years I spent a good deal of time on the road making sales calls.  We had a primary vendor whose Rep worked closely with me to build the business since we were introducing new technology into a somewhat reluctantly accepting industry.  Over time, we became a very effective team.  We learned to work together, much like those two hounds.  We each learned to utilize the other's strengths to offset our own areas of "less polish" -- I refuse to use the word weakness in this case, because we each were learning to strengthen those areas by adapting the techniques of the other.

We made a good team.

We all need to build teams -- relationships -- in which each knows their role and fills it in concert with the other(s).