I had shared the importance of research and development issues for companies, its position in the organization, characteristics of the manager etc. in my previous posts. What about the R & D employees?? There is an indisputable realty for companies especially showing size in the technology sector; R & D’s performance draws the fate of the company…R & D employees are in a decisive position for the companies. So what determines the performance of R & D employees??
An overall valid rule: the teams with strong team spirit are at least one step closer to success in business. So, is it the same for R & D?
The term unsocial, as the opposite expression of social is defined as “the one exhibiting non-social human behavior”. Unsocial people are the ones who can not enter or do not prefer to enter into society, thus who don’t give priority to communicate with people. Now we come accros with two questions: are the R & D people unsocial? If yes, should R & D people be social ..?
For companies working in technical fields and doing R & D in the real sense, R & D engineer’s first task is to do research and then to develop with the data they obtained. The research issue is much easier today, thanks to a miraculous tool such as internet. But still, libraries, books, publications, articles and so on are the basis of many sources of research. Research, in this context may be considered as an individual activity. When we come to development, in the new design stage it is possible to work individual, but it is impossible for a development activity to be completed without having contact with the buyers, the testers, the mechanic designers, graphicers etc..! Nevertheless, especially R & D activities that require high concentration and continuous operation, can cause to spend hours or may be days without communicating with environment…and in time, this kind can turn to be a habit or a behavior characteristics. I can briefly say that I often observed this in the teams I used to manage.
The ability to communicate in the workplace, although not a hundred percent applicable rule, is in fact parallel with the ability to communicate in daily life. An R & D person who needs a request from a collegue of his department or another department, considers this as an opportinity to chat or share something if he has a social character. But an R & D person of asocial type thinks many methods to escape from requesting something, and at last tries to finalize the subject by sending just an e-mail instead of having a direct contact.
An R & D person who doesn’t have sharings or doesn’t try to have a place in the community in his business life generally also continue to do so in private life..or vice versa, a person adopted an unsocial life in private, exhibits a behavior that avoids communication in business life. However, work is more enjoyable for R & D people who loves to be in the community, feels pleasure from engaging in social activities with private friends and collegues. I strongly recommend using the business environment to socialize, sometimes of course..! 🙂
It is very clear that it is not mandatory for R & D people to be social like the people working at sales, marketing, public relations, corporate communication…but it is undeniable that sociability provides positive performance for R & D teams targeted the success with team spirit. Anyway, sociability feature which is optional for R & D staff is a standard and mandatory characteristics for R & D managers 🙂
