Joseph Caropepe A Journey

Respect the Role

09.19.2012 · Posted in Articles, Business & Worklife, Teamwork

Every role comes with responsibility.

When I see you aren’t taking care of your responsibilities I have a couple of options.

If I don’t respect your role, I’m free to tackle those responsibilities myself.

Sure it’s extra work for me, but – especially if we don’t value teamwork – I’ll look good in the eyes of my superiors, and maybe get a  promotion.

On the other hand, if I respect the role, and we value teamwork, and you involve me, I’ll do anything in my power to help you succeed.

Respect the role.

2 Responses to “Respect the Role”

  1. This post is notably *completely* independent of the business value derived from either option. You are focused only on relationships, roles, and the pre-cursors to the reason we work together in the first place – delivering value.
    As a root-cause inspection – I think that is good.

    But many people can only think in terms of “what does that do for me?”
    So, I want to extrapolating just a bit to include the impact on delivering value.

    In option one, value is probably delivered sooner.
    But it will suffer from lack of scalability (unless you have a cloning/time machine), and a high opportunity cost (whatever you, the effective one, aren’t doing) – there are a host of other more long-term costs (burnout, silo’ing, resentment, etc)

    In option two, business value is delivered later*.
    That value will, by definition (teamwork) be more scalable, and over time* the value will be far greater because 1+ dedicated, respectful professionals will tend to deliver better overall solutions more consistently than one.

    Sounds obvious, but I think you are right to note that this all starts with what you describe above.
    Good post.

    Lief

    * This time span isn’t necessarily that long because dedicated people tend to deliver for EACH OTHER – but as you say it takes respect.

  2. Good point about business value. I’m not addressing *what* get’s done, or how quickly it can be accomplished.

    I’m only talking about *how* it gets done.