Baton hand-offs

“The successful person is open-minded and tolerant on all subjects. If you close your mind, you will be shut off from the recognition of favorable opportunities and the friendly cooperation of others.” – Napoleon Hill

During a relay race, the trickiest part is always the baton hand-off. The better the hand-off, the easier the race.

How can we become better at hand-offs in our teams? We start, as Dr. Hill suggests, by being open-minded and tolerant on all subjects. Examples:

• A copywriter learning terminal commands from a developer. Perhaps they could commit basic website text changes to a source code repository themselves, saving a developer from having to step in after every tweak.
• A developer learning presentation skills from a relations manager. Perhaps they could better articulate the team’s engineering genius to stakeholders.
• An administrator learning some basic image editing skills from a designer. Perhaps they could communicate more viscerally with everyone they meet.

Doing so may, in fact, help us recognize “favorable opportunities” from the “friendly cooperation” we initiate.

How could your team benefit from better baton hand-off?