What makes a good team player? Here are my thoughts, in order of importance:

 

1) Help others get success

2) Respect others, treat everybody with courtesy

3) Open to learn

4) Be proactive, willing to step up and take lead

5) Challenge status quo, always look for better ways

6) Ownership, result focus

 

1) and 2) are the areas I need to improve on the most. It's not like I am bad in helping others or treat others in rude manner. But when pressure is on, it's so natural for me to focus on getting things done and 1) and 2) get slipped to the back seat.

 

Write this down to help remind myself. Months/years later, I can come back and see if I have imporved on these two.

When I left from work today, CNN was playing a program discussing lead paint of toys made in China. I stood on the staircase and listened to the program for a few minutes, the program concluded with a survery question. I don't remember the exact wording, but here is what I recall:

 

"20 years after american toy companies shifted production to China, do you feel outrageous that China promised not to use lead paint on toys only recently"

 

OK, here is my answer: I do feel outrageous that american toy makers have not been doing any quality check w.r.t lead paint for 20 years. And, CNN, I feel a lot of shame on you for misleading the audience into China bashing.

 

Don't get me wrong, I do think it's a big shame that some toy makers in China used lead paint. But hold on for a moment, China is a developing capitalism. What do you expect if the big american toy companies don't have quality check in place and continuously apply downward price pressure to the manufacturer? As a sound human being one shouldn't do this kind of things by moral standard, but shouldn't you expect some bad apples from any country and plan for it? It's also important to remember that those lead paint toy were not only for export, as one would felt from this CNN question, those toys were sold to Chinese consumers as well. It's unfortunate that China, as a developing country, have not built a sound quality check process in place yet. But shouldn't you expect that from a developing country and take your own responsibility in making sure the product you are selling to consumers, under your own brand, are safe?

 

Again, China is still a developing country, a developing capitalism, that has a lot of things need to improve on. What did the developing capitalism USA ( and all other western countries for that matter ) do hundreds years ago? Should one feel outrageous that houndreds years after declaring all human beings are equal, american were still using slaves? I don't even need to mention that a lot of western countires' early capitalism development was attributed to robbing and colonizing the rest of the world. I have to say compared to those track record, China's development is much cleaner.

 

Shame on you, American media.

 

 

 

I never lacked passion, what I don't always have is patience and perseverance.

 

I was so obessesed in Golf in the recent couple weeks, really hoping to make a leap of progress on my game. The result, yes, I made good progress, but I was not enjoying the game as much as I could. I became so upset when I hit bad shots and almost broke my clubs several times. More importantly, I could'nt focus on other important things in my life, such as my family, my work and my application etc. The truth is Golf is not something one can improve by 10 shots in just a short period of time, it takes patience and perseverance, just as most of other important things in one's life.

 

I've heard people talking about learning things from playing golf, seems I am learning something from it too.

 

Here is what I am going to do tacticly:

 

1. practice or play golf three times a week, spend an additional 1-2 hours a week studying videos, lessons etc.

2. spend 10-20 minutes stretching my body to improve flexibility 3-5 times a week

3. be more patient with my progress, no club hitting after a bad shot, most important thing about golf: enjoy the game

4. no thinking of golf the rest of time, focusing on other priorities ( improve myself on my work, finish my applications by the end of Sept )

 

引用《荀子:劝学》节录以自勉:

 

For Golf and for anything else in my life

 

I had a lesson learned today.

 

I was talking to one of my direct report about a project. At the end of the conversation, I told him that to meet the project deadline, his work needs to be approved by our VP by next Tuesday, which means be approved by my manager this Friday, and I asked for him to finish the work and review with me this Thursday. There was nothing wrong in my statement, however, there could've been a better way of communicating it. I didn't even realize it till my direct report gave me the feedback that I was not being very respectful to him. He likened my statement to telling a kid to do X,Y by Z time.

 

I immediately realized that it was a very helpful and fair feedback. I thanked him and promised to improve my way of communication in the future. After the meeting, I was thinking more about this. One thing I tried to recall was how my previous manager communicated this type of request/timeline to me in the past. Then I started to realize there were only a handful of times that he directly told me "this needs to be done by X". Most often, what he did was ask me "when do you think you can get this done?", then when I gave an answer that didn't fit the overall project time line, he would ask me the sort of questions like "when do you think this needs to be reviewed by our VP in order to hit the project timeline?", and let me realize that my original timeline wouldn't work, and came up a new timeline myself. I never paid attention to this tactic till today, but now I realize that what he was doing was really making the other person feel more empowered by letting him/her make a "choice", albeit it's not really a choice per se.

 

One could argue that this is kind of hyporitical, but I actually see this as key component of one's soft skill and negotiation skill: Letting the other guys feel in control. Especially when working with junior colleagues, or direct reports, letting them make a choice would be viewed as respectful, while telling them what to do would be viewed as bossy, even though the short term outcome is the same, the long term impact on associate loyalty/moral is vastly different.

 

Thanks for the feedback. I need to watch out for more of these types of small things in the future. I know I am kind of dumb on Emotional Intelligence front, but hopefully with my openness to learn, and adaptiveness, I can become better and better on my soft skills.