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Teaming Up for Success

10/1/2011

October is an exciting, multi-sport month. The Rugby World Cup is being slugged out in New Zealand, while in the U.S., the NHL faces off, baseball ends with the World Series, and football moves to center stage. The NFL pros are unlocked-out, college rivalries are back, and Friday night lights brighten high- school bleachers.

ACI student chapter members are playing varsity, club, and intramural sports, while forming study and project teams for "collaborative learning." Faculty meetings are back in all their glory, and members of the concrete industry in all roles are meeting with clients, colleagues, and coworkers to make plans and solve problems. ACI chapters have already met to kick-off their program year, certification training and evaluating teams are in action, and our committees are gearing up for the fall meeting-a-thon in Cincinnati. In all these efforts, in the competitive worlds of sports, education, or the concrete industry, success is achieved by skilled individual contributors, working together in teams to multiply and magnify their efforts.

ACI offers many opportunities for individual achievement: authorship of CI and journal articles; presentations at seminars, convention sessions, and chapter meetings; and leadership of committees, subcommittees, and local chapters. Each committee and chapter has a number of devoted members who pitch in to write first drafts, make calls, coordinate activities, and negotiate between meetings for progress and compromise. Our annual awards program at the spring convention recognizes and honors many of these deserving folks, and the long list keeps our hard-working award committees busy all year. But looking a little closer, we see that behind every award winner, key player, and ACI event or deliverable there is a group that makes the achievement possible.

Nearly all articles and presentations are based on the work of a team of researchers, practitioners, or students and are always based on previous work by many others. For every award-winning committee Chair or chapter officer, there is a group of dedicated volunteers willing to be led. Visitors enjoying a local chapter dinner meeting may not recognize that the local Board planned and coordinated that activity. Attendees at our conventions may not realize that the local chapter convention committee and ACI event planning staff have been working for over 3 years to organize every detail, and that the Technical Activities Committee approved the technical sessions long ago. (While we are all enjoying Cincinnati, the Dallas crew and ACI staff are sprinting to the finish line for next spring's convention.) While technical sessions may appear to be a series of independent speakers, committees work hard to plan and coordinate sessions and invite, select, introduce, and manage speakers. Technical, education, certification, and Board committees and ad hoc task groups meet at, and sometimes between, conventions. There is no question that in ACI there is plenty of room for individual achievement, but most of the big and exciting things get done by teams of individuals working together.

ACI chapter and committee officers have the opportunity and responsibility to fill out our rosters with skilled and willing contributors, to develop a deep bench, and to rotate our players to not only train them and give them enough floor- or field-time, but also to share the load and prevent burnout. It's our job to recognize when a team member is in a slump and to find out how we can help. It is also our job to encourage our superstars for the good of the team and to ensure that their contributions do not diminish the contributions of others. ACI's officers should also make sure that their own replacements have the opportunity to learn the ropes and are prepared for a smooth transition in coaching staff.

Ted Ohart, retired Vice President of General Electric and frequent visiting speaker at Cornell, often challenged our engineering students to make their dreams and goals so large that accomplishing them was beyond one's personal capacity as an individual contributor. ACI has risen to that challenge with our five institutional goals to be recognized as the leader in developing and disseminating concrete knowledge; communicate sustainable and environmental benefits of concrete structures; collaborate with other organizations to improve the quality of concrete; expand education, certification, and career-related programs; and enhance value and benefit in ACI membership. While none of us can accomplish even one of these alone, when we team up, "We can do this!"

Kenneth C. Hover
American Concrete Institute
kch7@cornell.edu

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