Yesterday I got a nice reminder on how important it is to put together a great team.
I got to work, and my partner is on vacation. I knew she was on vacation and that meant I had to handle reorders. Not a problem, that is what we do.
However, I get to work and find out our website is down. Great! I pivot and start seeing what I need to do to fix that. Then I find out our 2nd register at our flagship store is down. They still have one register but our IT guys say they can’t get the P.O.S. system to find the database. To top it off, the hard drive is most likely about to crash. It’s a 7 year old computer operating without ever being shut off: 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. That means it’s been continuously running for 61, 152 hours. Give or take. We’ve had power outages so it go 5-10 minutes of rest every few years.
I know how it feels.
This means I now have to pivot again to start prepping our backup, which wasn’t properly set up by the previous guy. No drivers for the receipt printer or cash drawer. Yay! Googling drivers is fun (I know have them saved for future use.)
This is why teams are important and when I discovered the 3 keys to our success.
Initiative
I still got orders done. Not me. My Awesome Team member Shannon did those for me. And Andrea, who was on vacation, prepped the spreadsheets so that they could be formatted using macros in the layout that our main vendor uses. Andrea took the initiative to find a way to speed up the formatting process last week, not knowing how helpful it would be yesterday.
Shannon had previously been trained to cut orders when Andrea was on maternity leave (and I was working on our Point of Sale implementation), so she was able to help. More importantly, she offered without me asking. That’s awesomeness. She saw a problem our company was having, and she knew she could help.
Preparation
As mentioned above, we previously trained Shannon to cover when Andrea was on maternity leave, so we were prepared if Andrea was ever on extended leave again. Andrea made things even easier by streamlining our ordering process so that Shannon and I could easily step in as needed. We can now easily train others to step in if we want. She even has a list of vendors on her computer that we used as a checklist to ensure we didn’t miss anyone.
Collaboration
Of course, all of that wouldn’t make a difference if Shannon, Andrea, and I hadn’t been collaborating on previous projects. Together we’ve worked on several projects to great success, so this unexpected one-day project went smoothly.
I also can’t thank enough the guys over at My IT Pros who helped solve the problems that were way over my head in the computer department. I know about our P.O.S. system, as I helped set it up, but know very little about networks and static IPs. Also, while I was working on getting the P.O.S. system up they were helping get our website back online.
Teamwork. The team performed amazingly because of those 3 things: Preparation, Initiative, & Collaboration. Both my team, and the team we’ve hired to handle IT saved this day from becoming a disaster. For that I am eternally thankful.
Do you have a Team Awesome at your company that’s ready for a crisis? If not, start forming one now.
Joe Robles 