Christmas Elves and Being a Good Team Member
I’d love to have a Christmas Elf to help me be a better team member.
Christmas Elves
Thanks to the elves, Santa Claus is always ready for Christmas. Imagine that you had a few elves working for you. What would you ask them to do? (professionally speaking, not at home 😂)
My Christmas Elves
If I had a team of Christmas Elves, I would ask them to do the following tasks:
Prepare the meeting agenda one day in advance, and share it with the participants.
Take notes during the meeting, summarize them and share them with the participants after the meeting.
Review my code before requesting a code review.
Prepare the pull request with screenshots, a description of the task, and a list of the most significant changes. In general, make the reviewer fall in love with my pull request.
To try to solve the problem before asking for help.
Communicate clearly to the team members what I’m doing now and what I’ll be doing next.
Explain the context and the problem clearly, and propose a solution when asking for help.
Take a look at the upcoming tasks and find possible dependencies or blockers from other teams or projects.
Carry all the responsibility for my tasks. I wish the elves would take Extreme Ownership of the tasks I am assigned.
Execute the tasks based on the team's priorities, and let me work on the ones I enjoy the most.
Manage the stakeholders' expectations and keep them up to date with my progress.
Well, it seems that my elves would be very busy 😂
Unfortunately, I don’t have elves working for me. Yet, the work I would request is worth doing, and I might not be doing it because I am too lazy or don’t enjoy it.
Being a Good Team Member
Many times, I should be doing this or that for my team, but I don’t. I put it out because I don’t feel like it or prefer working on something else. But deep down, I know I’m wrong. I wish I could delegate those tasks to someone else. That’s how I got the idea of the Christmas Elf.
I’d love to have a Christmas Elf to help me be a better team member.
But instead of that, I will try to perform some of those tasks myself.
I’ll be my own Christmas Elf to become a better team member.
How about you? Which tasks would you like your elves to do?
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