I’ve been working in Uppsala, Sweden, about 45 minutes north of Stockholm, this week and have learned a few very valuable business lessons. I was lucky to have the opportunity to travel when most other travel opportunities have been cut, and I’ve really focused on making the most of the trip.

Coming into the week I wanted to focus on really investing myself fully into the deliverables that I’d committed to in order to justify the trip and also through building relationships that are critical in order to successfully execute on the project in the future. With those two focuses in mind, I’ve learned quite a lot and have, I think, succeeded in both.

Investing Yourself Emotionally

Many times, at home, I have so many different projects going that I struggle to focus on one thing at a time. With work priorities, project interests, family obligations, and finally lowest on the priority list, personal time, it becomes tough to balance and focus on any one of the tasks. This week, being away from home, I decided to completely remove myself and focus on work whole heatedly. The results have been phenomenal.

When you’re traveling for business you travel with people who you basically have one thing in common, work. This inevitably drives dinner conversation towards work topics and because of this I’ve been able to learn a lot. Being on the younger side of the group I’ve just listened and have been able to learn from others experiences. I’ve openly challenged ideas so that I can really get to the source of a particular issue and really extract the value from it. Without being pulled out of the normal flow of a day back home, and without being really focused on the work and issues at hand, I likely never would have had these conversations, nor learned so much from my colleagues. Sometimes it takes a bit of a shake up to create these situations.

By investing myself and focusing completely on work I’ve really maximized the the value of the trip. Both for the business and for myself. Now, with perfect weather in Sweden and the weekend approaching I plan to fully invest myself in the culture of Stockholm. I’m going mountain biking with a Swedish colleague on Saturday and hitting the Stockholm clubs on Saturday evening. If you’re not doing it all, your not doing enough!

Building Relationships to Get Things Done

Early in the week it was clear that there were major “perspective” differences in how to approach our project. We were unaligned and working towards similar goals without any collaboration. It was clear that a recalibration of focus was critical and the team needed to be rejuvenated. Working in IT it is often easy to become the claimed cause of a “business problem” when in reality we are here to help solve and avoid problems.

Instead of taking the defensive stand, I told the team, “we’ve got to align goals and make these relationships work for the good of the project and of the underlying business needs”. After significant back-and-forth sessions exchanging fairly opposing views, solutions were landed upon and I believe (only time will tell) that we, as a whole, came out on top. There was not a sense of win-or-lose, but more a feeling of joint progress and accomplishment. With stronger relationships now in place, we’ll be able to collaborate better when working over the phone and divide and concur tasks that would be fought over in the past.

Often times it seems that a solution may never be reached but usually people will come around. All it takes is the ability to bring similar goals to the surface. If you can create a similar goal and/or direction you can begin to move and work together in ways that you never could have in the past! You will surely enjoy the people you are working with more and in turn you will start to love your work. So often, it’s not the work that makes the process enjoyable, it’s the people that you interact with and the people that challenge you that make it fun!