How do we work together… as a large group?
As Minh On mentioned in his blog, the GC Entrepreneur cohort is a “distributed team with 19 members from a range of departments and agencies spread throughout Ottawa and include members from Toronto, Montreal and Quebec City”. If you ask me, that’s a lot of people, often in small spaces with a lot of stuff to say.
Back in February when the GC Entrepreneur cohort met for a two-day on-boarding session, a couple questions popped in my head:
- how will I ever have anything to contribute to this team when some of these people have more than half my age of government experience? . . . yup, some might have even joined government before I was even alive! and,
- who’s going to be the leader of the group?
Sure enough, we all contribute to the team one way or another. Given our different backgrounds (academically, professionally and life experience) we all have something to bring to the table and we all take a lead at different opportunities. And what is admirable is that we each respect what each other’s strengths and weaknesses are, and we are willing to share and learn together what we know and don’t know. Here are a few examples:
- Leanne Lalonde is a drawing wizard and is influencing the cohort to be more visually representative in the way we work and share information.
- Dr. Mike Haber who is neuroscientist/biologist is actually an undercover graphic designer (he made our business cards).
- Kate McKerlie knows everything on engagement tools and practices.
The beauty of the hidden skills that we all have is that we complement one another. Funny enough, there is no “head honcho” in the group. Quite figuratively, we all pick up the slack where needed, and volunteer to complete deliverables based on our time and other priorities.
Now, it hasn’t always been this easy. We have had some growing pains. I will share two:
1. As you can imagine and know, 19 people from different departments and agencies means that there are 19 different record management systems. So how do we work together on documents and share them without sending individual versions through email? (Think of the version control nightmare). We quickly found that some of us had access to google docs and others didn’t. So through Cedric, our friends from Canadian Heritage were able to hook us up with a SharePoint site. However, we realized that some of us had access to SharePoint and others didn’t. At some point, some of us were using our smartphones to access SharePoint and if not, then we would be working from home at night because that was the only way to access documents. BUT THERE HAS TO BE A BETTER WAY! Well through some miracle and after some failed attempts at accessing SharePoint…. it worked! Sooooooo that’s how we share documents, edit and save stuff. To Alex Benay: if you had something to do with this, then thank you! We also know that a lot of resources have been invested in GC Collab and GC Connex. While we are on GCCollab, we need to get better at using the site. Luckily for us, Gabriel Cossette is one of the newest GC Entrepreneurs from Shared Services and is an advocate for Government tools… so stayed tuned. We might soon be more engaged on GC Collab and GC Connex!
2. We need a moderator at meetings. When you are in a meeting and there are 19 people with their hands up to intervene and comment, you need some sort of system to hear everyone out and figure out who put their hand up first. So whenever we have our bi-weekly GC Entrepreneur meeting, there is usually someone that volunteers to be the “pointer” and points to whoever is next in the queue to speak.
All in all, it’s been a learning journey so far… and we are just getting started!
