Dear Brothers and Sisters,

In the working world, be it business or politics, your success doesn’t depend on your degrees or intelligence. Those are only good, sometimes, for new graduates looking for job. But after you get your first job out of college, your degrees and intelligence don’t mean much anymore. What will determine your career success is your ability to work with people.

This is the people-centered principle for success. It contains these basic points:

– You are very good in teamwork, to be the best worker.
– You are good in communication with everyone.
– You are honest
– You love and care about people in general.

These 4 points weave into one another so tightly that they really are one unit, one point. I just break it into 4 small points to present the lesson in an easier way to understand.

1. Good in teamwork. Do you know what a team is? “A team is a group of people working together on something.” What is the key term in the quote? The key term is “people” – you have computers, phones, Internet and all kinds of equipment the for a team, but those things are not in the definition of “team.” Team is the people. Teamwork means working with people in a team. A good worker works well with the team and every member of the team.

2. Good in communication. When you have a team, the first and most important task to master is communication. People often say, “80% of the problems of any company are communication problems.” I would change it to “99% of the problems of any company are communication problems.”

a) Communication problems are not exclusive for business. Whenever you have two persons talking to each other – husband and wife, parent and child, friend and friend, two strangers on the street – you have communication problems. Most of the time, this person says “A”, the other person understands it as “B”. Example: A pedestrian asks a person standing on the sidewalk the way to Highschool Nguyễn Thiện Thuật. The man answers: “Go in this direction (with finger pointing) for 500 meters, at the traffic light, turn right, and go for about 100 meters, you will see the school on your right.” The answer is simple and clear. 500m is about 5 blocks in this town. But the questioner walks 3 blocks and gets to a traffic light, and he thinks he has walked 500m, so he turns right, and … gets lost. Had he asked for the name of the street where he had to turn, he wouldn’t have been lost.

People talking, getting unclear information, and misunderstanding each other is a very very very common problem every day. So, good communication means when you hear something, ask some clarifying questions to be sure you understand exactly what the other person says. Usually when we hear a statement, we will need about 3 follow-up questions to be clear. Sometimes 5 or 6 follow-up questions, just like an investigator. Investigator hears one sentence and immediately has about 10 or 20 follow-ups.

So, to avoid miscommunication, when someone tells you to do something, ask follow-up questions until you absolutely understand what the task really is. Vice versa, when you tell someone to do something, try to talk as clearly and as detailed as you can, and be patient with the other person’s clarifying questions.

b) Communication also means you want the other team members to “walk with you” (đồng hành với bạn). When a team working on a project, the progress of one is the progress of all, and the problem of one is the problem of all. So, you want to let you team members know often about your progress and the problems you encounter, so that everyone knows what are happening with the project, and chip in their ideas for solutions to the problems. Every member of the team should talk often with one another about his/her work to keep the team informed – just like a soccer team, everyone has to always know where the others are and what each is doing on the field.

3. Honest. You simple can’t communicate well if you are not absolutely honest – lies, vague information and misleading information ruin all communications and make people mistrust you. Period.

4. Loving and caring. If you don’t love and care about each teammate in your team, you cannot communicate well with any team member.

All these four points actually congeal into one major point: communication. You must be a master in communication in your team. That makes you supergood in teamwork. And your work will usually have the quality of a master.

When I was working for the US government, there was a lady lawyer in my team. She always came to chat to me about what she was doing and we would talk about that. Almost every day, she came to my office or called me into her office when I walked by. She often said: “Hoanh, you are so smart. You are way above my head. I can’t never think the way you think.” I knew that too, so I just smiled and said nothing.

When she finished her part of the report of the team, she showed me her draft to read, and I was shocked – her report had the quality of a product of a super-lawyer, not the average lawyer talking to me every day. I knew that she was not good enough to write that report. So, how did she do that? Ah, I remember she talked to me every day. And, of course, she talked to everyone else in the team often too. I realized then that her final report was the combined knowledge she got from everyone in the team, not just her own original knowledge. Of course, it would have the quality of a master piece. That was a great lesson for me in teamwork.

If you are that good in teamwork, you will have the good reputation of a master. And you don’t have to look for jobs. Jobs will knock on your door often, because people talk about how good you are often. Your reputation will go far, and jobs will come to you, because so many people want you to work with them.

Wish you all be good in teamwork.

With compassion,

Hoành

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