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Have you ever purchased an item of equipment that you thought would come in really handy only to leave it lying around for months because you could not work out how to set it up? Or not set all the functions up, because it would have taken hours to read through the handbook, which looked as if it had been translated by a machine anyway?

Many people have experienced the state of affairs at some time or another. I had an alarm clock once that had dozens of features like waking me up at different times on the weekend to during the week and arbitrarily selecting a radio channel every day to wake me up. It also had a feature with which I could train it to recognize some voice commands, but I could not be bothered with all that.

I simply wanted it to wake me up whenever I set it. Video recorders are similar devices. How many times do you hear of people setting their video recorder to record a film only to get a documentary on another channel? It used to happen a lot, did it not?

The aspect that I am getting at here is that the designers of these machines have been told to put as many features as possible into them up to a price in order to be all things to all people. However, in making their equipment so complicated, a lot of people decide not to bother using them at all and will avoid that make in the future, which is the exact opposite of what the manufacturers wanted.

The next time you go out looking for some electrical gadget, you will say to yourself: “Oh, So-And-So, you need a degree to use one by So-And-So. I’m not buying one of theirs”.

So how can this affect you? Well, if you have to coordinate anything that you expect others to take part in or be enthusiastic about, try not to make it excessively complex. I am not saying ‘dumb-down’, just don’t show off by putting all the bells and whistles on it simply to show that you can do that. People will not be grateful to you for it, they will take no notice of your project.

This has a great deal of implications for on line projects where individuals can be hundreds of miles apart but still be working together on a joint project from home. Open source programming is a good example of this kind of work. The team leaders should keep everything as simple as possible if they want the maximum co-operation.

One way that you can use to check to see if your venture is being understood is to ask. It sounds self-evident and it should be, but a lot of team leaders will not ask because they think that it makes them look weak and unknowledgable. Again, in fact, the opposite is the case. A good team leader is not a tyrant; a good team leader is a good organizer and is considerate.

If you want to learn more about team-building, then try our website called Team Building to learn more.

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