ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines the importance of communication, teamwork, leadership, and trust, along with other related topics, as they pertain to the environmental industry. Communication and teamwork are, without question, essential cornerstones required for meeting project goals and objectives and catalysts for accelerating cleanup and streamlining decision making. As scientists and managers, we depend on technology for environmental investigation tools and laboratory methods, data evaluation and report generation, remediation processes, and specialty technologies such as geophysics. Effective teamwork is essential in order to work efficiently with internal and external counterparts, including coworkers, clients, agency per- sonnel, and community members. Improving communication, teamwork, and leadership can result in increasing performance and help accelerate response actions, however it is important to recog- nize that additional up-front costs and level of effort may be required in order to improve those skills, along with determination.
