6 Ways To Be a Successful Team Member (#3)

3. Take On A New Project With Enthusiasm
The other day I was offered a project that "had my name all over it" (so the person who offered me the project said).

Under normal circumstances it would have had my name all over it; but this was a volunteer job and thus far my experience with this organization is that while they tell you to be creative and have fun; in the end all of your creativity gets squashed and your energies get zapped. This time I declined.

I know, you're reading this looking at the title of the post wondering why you should take on a project with enthusiasm when I'm starting off with a bad example.

Because not everything works out the way we like.

When you take on a project you should ask yourself what can I do to make this project memorable to those who have asked me to take on the task; I ask myself what can I personally learn by taking on this project and finally I ask myself what talent or skill can I offer to make the outcome of this project even better than anyone had expected. Those three points are a great source of motivation and most of the time, they are the outcomes. Some of the time, as how I started this post, it doesn't work that way. My history with the "has my name all over it" organization is while they talk about new ideas, they can't get out of their old way of thinking. If it had been the first request I would have said yes.

In How To Be a Good Employee, a program I offer to college seniors and new hire orientations, I share the story of a woman whose employer sent her to search for a lost document believed to be in a row of file cabinets the size of a double-wide trailer. Talk about the needle in the haystack thing. Now how many people do you think signed up for that task? She wasn't looking at the floor or in the other direction and she won the prize!

In the end she told me she had a choice - be miserable or get herself excited about it. She chose to get excited. She is motivated to learn. One of the things she did was realize that a lot of company history was in those files and there was a lot to be learned about the organization. She was right. Down the road, when decisions and policies were made, she had a better understanding as to why.
She also decided to have some fun during her search. Wanna know what she did?

Get your organization to hire Rich and you'll learn.

There are so many opportunities that come along with a new project. Be enthusiastic and the outcome will be a much better experience - for everyone.

Tomorrow we'll do #4.