Visited our Taipei office and met several colleagues; one of them was H, a localization engineer advisor. You can see H is ‘special’ from the first word; he is highly energetic, articulated, not only experienced with our tools but also knowledgeable about the operation process; what’s more, he is familiar with popular competitive tools to give detailed comparison and recommendation. Yet, what sets him ‘most’ apart is his ‘willingness’ to go extra mile for teams: understand the problems or needs and create solutions, often outside of his duty or even work hours. H’d be an asset for any team.
Why is H different from those who could still be ‘descent’ employees as fulfilling role responsibilities? Is it personality or value? Environment (upbringing, colleague relation, etc.)? Curiosity? Perhaps all contribute…How can we ‘encourage or create’ more H? I think one way is to create a mechanism to bring these people together and have an open forum to channel ideas/ problems and repository to share/ co-create solutions. This gives people opportunities to contribute beyond their local needs (& save duplicated efforts) and technical skills and expand possibilities beyond the ‘official’ (usually much smaller) team and outputs. Think of it as creating an open-sourced movement within a company and a comradery culture to go extra miles for each other and succeed together!