SynthaSite planning week and boat trip
This past week at SynthaSite has been the first with the full newly-expanded international team together in the Cape Town office. This has been an opportunity to get to know the new hires and for everyone to come together with their ideas and come up with goals, plans, and specifications. Which meant a week with at least one meeting going on at any one time.
A big potential challenge to new hires, especially in management and other senior positions, is balancing their ability to contribute new things to your existing team but not getting swept away with them and hurting the common thread in your team. I must admit that I was a little worried about the decisions being made in meetings I wasn't a part of. This is a bad habit I've picked up over the years, and despite all indicators to the contrary and belief in those involved in the meetings, I couldn't entirely shake it.
On Thursday, the outcomes from the various meetings over the past few days were presented to the whole team. The most striking part of the meeting to me was how those who weren't in the earlier meetings were able to accurately predict the long-term and short-term goals and features and markets and so forth that were presented. The next most striking was how flexible and accepting those who'd spent hours in meetings to come up with these outcomes were of additions and removals from what they presented.
That was a perfect precursor to our reward for the week's work and a celebration of meeting a few internal targets in the last month — a boat trip out from the Cape Town waterfront on Friday afternoon.
Such a trip does have the potential to be a disaster — making a bunch of people wet and cold, forcing them to maintain their balance and their stomach, and otherwise messing with people isn't the best setting if there are issues between your people or if there's nothing binding them already. We did have new hires, after all.
But our new hires are much like the rest of us. No suits or fancy clothes when we're all office-bound. Shoes are optional. But when it comes to work, serious. More experienced than most of us, and older than most of us, but with the same youthful excitement and wonder for the space we're in and what we're doing. They're also just nice people — I've enjoyed watching every possible combination of new and old employee having multiple one-on-one conversations over the past week.
So, no disaster.
The boat trip itself was a lot of fun for me, despite getting absolutely soaked and nearly falling overboard a few times. I guess one has to do it to understand how that can be enjoyable, since I can't think of much to say in explanation. We ended up cutting the trip a bit short to avoid the setting sun and the ensuing cold and to rather have a warm supper in a warm restaurant. The review and exchange of photographs meant many laughs all around, and the shared adventure meant ample topic for discussion.
Syndicated 2008-04-06 16:48:00 from Cosmic Seriosity Balance
