One of the most difficult things as an employee in an organization is to complete tasks effectively, how and when you want. This is not because you do not have the required capacity or skill to get things done but because you require other people working within the organization to make some inputs before you complete the tasks.
What makes an organization is a combination of human resources working harmoniously to achieve the set organizational tasks. In an organization, no employee can work in isolation. A simple task given to a Content Writer, for instance, can require him/her working with Archive department, Editor/Proofreader, and Website Manager before it is completely done. If anyone in this chain is not ready to do his/her part or proving difficult to work with, completing the task becomes difficult.
Nonetheless, it doesn’t matter whether or not the faults come from you, what matters is that you didn’t complete the task—and this isn’t, and can’t, be acceptable by any organization. And that’s why you need to find an effective means of making people work with you with ease.
Here are some tips to help you out:
1. Interpersonal skills
This is your ability to communicate and interact well with your colleagues. If you find it difficult interacting with your colleagues, getting things done as a team will be very difficult, if not impossible. These skills include:
- Better communication skills: This is not only about learning the rules of grammar. It’s about having a firm control of the company’s official language so that you don’t say what you don’t mean or mean something different from what you wish to say. It’s also about passing out instructions in the best appealing and polite way. If you can’t get your colleagues to understand what you want, they either end up doing something totally different from what you want or doing nothing at all.
- Self-confidence: You need to be confident in your abilities and be bold enough to, for instance, ask questions or challenge your colleagues when they fail to do their own part of a task you need to execute. If you are not confident, your colleagues may trivialize your position in the organization and consider your task requests unimportant.
- Good persuasive skills: This, simply, is your ability to make your colleagues attach the required importance to your task requests and get them done on time. A colleague may be busy with some other tasks on his desk, but if you have a good persuasive skill, you will be able to convince him to give priority to your own assignment. At times, you may need to have a moderate sense of humour to achieve this.
- Friendliness and Caring Attitude: You can’t get your colleagues to work with you by being bossy; because you are not the boss, you’re just a colleague! So, you need to show some level of friendliness and compassion. Avoid having fracas with your colleagues, and if there is any, make sure you resolve it within yourselves. Don’t (unnecessarily) report your colleagues to the management; it only makes situations worse.
2. Work with an organized schedule
Always make sure you get the relevant colleagues on a specific task involved well ahead of the execution time—except the task is an impromptu one. If you want a colleague to do something for you, logic and organizational sense demand that you give him time enough to do it—considering the nature of the task and the fact that because he may also have other tasks at hand.
3. A proper understanding of the organization and the personnel
To get things done efficiently, you must understand your organization’s operations as well as personnel’s designations. When you know the appropriate department or personnel to meet for a specific task, it becomes easier to get it done easily without wasting time.
