The importance of the TEAM. Certainly the best of Just-Ene

In my first 4 years of work-experience I seriously doubted of my qualities for Teamwork. To be sitting face to face with my senior without hardly speaking a word day after day did not favor at all to improve this sensation.

Many of you know, but I must recognize to be surprisingly bad at lying, reason enough to avoid it in the 99,9% of the cases. Nevertheless, in this case, I could do nothing else than to lie, if I wanted to work in any other place sometime in my life. 

Obviously, the, do you know how to Teamwork?  never failed in any interview. I doubt anyone ever responded no. But reality was that I did not know. In effect, I had serious doubts about it.

After some years it seemed that I started to interiorize my “lie”, and finally convinced someone to believe me. And after 4 years of thinking that I was unable to work with a Team, I could see by myself what it meant.

The first days of work in my new job, I was astonished. People working until after 9 in the evening with good humor, laughs, supporting each other … even the effect of “the last 5 minutes question of the classroom”; at 9 in the evening you could still ask whatever you wanted, and instead of heading home, this person came to sit next to you to help you with what you were doing. To have your director working side by side with you at 2 in the morning if necessary, and still offering himself to do the binding of the document, was, at least surprising for me. 

All of a sudden, the rest of the Team asked for your opinion, and, most important, took it into consideration. After, in past time, having received from my superiors comments like: “you are not paid for thinking”, left me flabbergasted.

Equally, that new projects, accounts or contracting policies weren’t secrets guarded locked up in a trunk 1000 meters deep, helped to understand the decisions of the company, and to feel as a participant in the project.

I started to see that teams weren’t a paranormal phenomena. It seemed that they really did exist. A good working atmosphere was what made me wake up with good humor and a smile on my face even knowing that the day had more than 12 hours of work. Working more and sleeping less, people who know me would say that I looked happy and better. And that is how it was; I was happy, very happy.

I do not know if it is the first or the second experience, what is more normal. Anyway, I am grateful to those years of No-Team to have permitted me to value the years of YES-TEAM. In my last job I learnt many things, and if I had to choose one, no doubt it will be the last one. The most important thing in a company is not more not less, this. And now I finally have the opportunity to make my little Big Team, it is this what I want for Just-Ene.

What I really look for in the people I want to work with me, are these four main things:  i) that they believe in the project at least one fourth of what I believe (which is already much), ii) that they transmit to me personal quality and personal involvement, iii) that they understand that the beginnings are hard, but this is a project  of all of us together and we will grow together as well and, iv) that, obviously, they have to bring their knowledge and complement those who already are in it.

When you create something new, everybody has to work and do it hard. I have named myself errand-girl and trainee for the rest of my colleagues. We all have a common goal, and the objective is to facilitate things for the others, to make the best outcome as fast as possible. Unfortunately for me, I am not competent in everything I would like to, so I am always eager to help in whichever tasks I am able to carry out (thanks to my years of being a trainee, I can put in data, make photocopies, bind documents and classify as the best printer). I never saw myself cutting pieces of leather until deep into the night with a smile.

That being said, I have to say, that today, I am incredibly happy to have surrounded myself with the people who day by day, make it possible for Just-Ene to be closer to reality. To have people by my side who believe in the project so much and sometimes I doubt if more than myself. That when I have a bad day (I do have them too), are able to give me a pat and remind me that we have something genial. That when things are not turning out in some way, they are not blocked and search for solutions (I really love this kind of people), and in fact, they find them even before I had the occasion to start worrying about it. Who feel this project so much of their own, that they put in it all their efforts and their time day after day. Sincerely, THANK YOU, TEAM.