Project Management

Mind Your Ts and Qs: The Talents of Teams

Ian Whittingham, PMP is director of Calixo Consulting, providing project and program management expertise from initiation through to implementation, covering business transformation, workflow process re-engineering, and enterprise data integration. He is a regular contributor to ProjectManagement.com. You may contact Ian directly at [email protected].

All projects depend on collaboration. Few things on a project are accomplished in absolute isolation. The very fact that you are reading this article owes as much to those involved in publishing and delivering it your screen as it does to my having written it in the first place. What talent I may claim as a writer can only come to light from the collaboration of the team who make it possible for you to read these words.

Collaboration is the coordinated coming together of singular tasks that create collective value. Teams successfully create value when their collective accomplishment is greater than the sum of their individual talents. At an individual level, what we call talent can be described as the unique combination of skill, competency and experience that is applied to successfully accomplish a specialized task.

Complimenting my goddaughter on her performance in the seasonal ballet The Nutcracker, someone remarked to me on her being a “very talented dancer.” Apart from the admiration it provoked in me, I thought about other adverbs that might equally describe the quality of her dancing, such as skillful or graceful or natural. They all describe the manner in which the skill of her dancing is accomplished.

But in watching her performance, what was apparent to me was that the expression of her talent was most visible in her interaction with the other …


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