Common Courtesy Conducive to Collaboration

Ty is a work management evangelist; "accidental" project manager and marketing veteran with over 25 years of experience.

  ProjectsAtWork  

It is a given that collaboration is critical to project success. But less attention is given to how we interact with our peers, superiors and subordinates. Cordial communication is also important to project management success.

In May of 1940, Neville Chamberlain was removed as Great Britain's Prime Minister for failure to respond to the threat of war from Germany. As the newly appointed Prime Minister, his first address before Parliament is where Winston Churchill famously said, "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat."

However, my point in bringing up Winston Churchill is not to discuss his ability to rally England to repel a potential German invasion, but to acknowledge his graciousness and generosity of spirit to a former rival at his passing. It would have been easy to bash and otherwise castigate Chamberlain for his inaction, however Churchill realized that doing so would do nothing to advance the cause of freedom and would only tarnish the name of the former Prime Minister and cheapen his own. 

Instead, this is a snippet of what Churchill had to say at Chamberlain's funeral, "It fell to Neville Chamberlain in one of the supreme crises of the world to be contradicted by events, to be disappointed in his hopes, and to be deceived and cheated by a wicked man. But what were these hopes in which he was …

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