Everybody always hates team-building. At a startup, there are already not enough hours in the day, and it seems like a total waste to spend time at something as un-urgent as team-building.
Over the last few months, I’ve had the good fortune to get to know Jim Marsden. Jim has spent the last 20 years of his career at Hewlett Packard helping teams of all sizes and in all types of business lines increase their effectiveness, and he recently left HP to start his own consulting firm.
One of Jim’s first post-HP gigs was with IntenseDebate. Despite the normal time stress felt by everybody on the IntenseDebate team, Jim managed to get some time with each member of our team, and then with us together as a group. During the interviews and group discussions, Jim helped surface a lot of things, and introduced us to some concepts that will help us work better together.
All-in-all, despite the headwind, we unanimously thought that the time with Jim was extremely well spent and very worthwhile! Jim was awesome, he absolutely crushed our expectations about how much and what we could learn and change.
One thing that will stay with me for a long time was Jim’s distilled characterization of our team: off the charts integrity and off the charts appetite for learning.
I’m extremely proud to be part of a team so characterized.