I Get By With A Little Help From My Friends

There are days when being your best gets tough. There are days when you lose sight of what you're working for. And there are days when you just want to throw your hands in the air and walk away like you just don't care! But when you're ready to collapse to the floor, remember that you have a whole team ready to lift you back up. This next core value is what will keep you going when the road to success seems to be running uphill.

• Fostering Teamwork and Embrace the Power of Unity

The first step is to figure out your own personal strengths and desires for your career. Once you have done that, the next thing to do is to figure out how that fits in with all the other personalities that you work with. I view this process as putting a puzzle together. At first the pieces are scattered and they don't make sense. Each one has a different shape, color, and size. Individually, your piece of the puzzle is unique and has worth, but alone it does not make a picture. The image only starts coming together once you have been connected to another one. The process of putting together a puzzle is time consuming and sometimes extremely frustrating. I have seen many tables flipped during family "fun time", when grandma can't find the the right piece... But with a little time and effort, all the pieces fit together and the big picture starts to take form. 

Once you know where you fit, you have to learn how to maintain balance and harmony with your fellow coworkers. Individually, we all have strengths and weaknesses. What makes a team work is acknowledging that my strength is your weakness and vice versa. At Northwest Neurology we try to encourage developing the strengths that we have but also to gain skills by learning from others. During this process, we learn who we work best with and who our personalities clash with. There will probably be people that you can't stand and you don't want to work with, but keep in mind the end goal, and learn how to combine your strengths with theirs to get the job done. 

Now here comes the big part. The most cliche "there's no I in team" part. This is the idea that is the hardest to get past. The idea that it is not all about you. We do embrace individuality. We do accept being different. We do encourage personality. But we understand that not one part of the puzzle is more important the other. Without just one piece, the picture is not complete. It is alright to know that you have strengths and to know that you are good at what you do. You can probably do the job alone if it was necessary but the idea of teamwork and community means that you don't have to. There are many quotes for teamwork and how we build each other up to rise to the top. But those are just words. True teamwork takes a lot of personal strength, to understand what you have and what you lack and to make that work with someone else. Sometimes the ordinary things that you do become extraordinary by the people you're doing them with. 

You don't need to rush to the top by yourself to have a party of one at the end of the day. Climb up the steep hill to success with your coworkers at your side, then throw a huge rager at the end of a completed goal!