ADAPT #15 - Fabric of a Team

Hey!

This is perhaps as useful to teams and businesses as it is to partnerships, families, couples and marriages…

Often we separate work and life only to realise that it is all kinda part of the same continuum.

Take this as a provocation of course, there are hundreds of models and ways to think about it.

This is the way I do it - hopefully you can pick what you need and use it :-)

There are for me FIVE key elements in establishing the fabric of a team or a relationship:

CARE

I think the cornerstone in my view is care, without it, there’s no point.

You must care for yourself, each other, the product, the service, the brand, the space in which you work or live, the customer, the process, the system - you need to deeply care, give a shit about it or else change, change and find something or someone you do care about.

Now, here is the twist, CARE, when done regularly and consistently (which is awesome by the way) tends to perversely disappear.

Tends to become expected and therefore lose its impact.

The trick is SPONTANEOUS CARE.

Find a way to make caring visible by surprising yourself, each other, your customer, your team.

Give them the unexpected love they did not see coming and watch how suddenly it’s visible and reciprocated.

Go on, do something for yourself you weren’t expecting ;-)

TRUST

Trust is a tricky one, we are kinda biologically wired to build trust over time, slowly.

Generally, corporations, jobs and relationships all follow this model of act by act earning each other’s trust.

This model is fine when time is on your side and there’s a degree of stability.

But in today’s markets, things move so fast, people move so fast from one job or team or opportunity to the other that if we take too long to trust them we miss the best in them.

I think we must learn to ASSUME TRUST - not easy but necessary to move fast in today’s environment.

Trust 100% from the get-go and work on keeping it there rather than building up to it.

And remember, you are not trusting they won’t fail, you trust they will fail and recover.

RESPECT AND ADMIRATION

Spend the time and put the effort into learning about each other, connect at a human level and find reasons to admire and respect one another.

It’s hard when the way we usually start an introduction is “Hi I am Gus the marketing manager”, instead of “I’m Gus and my toenails are painted rainbow” (some of you remember why my toenails are painted rainbow, and if you don’t know you will hopefully be curious enough to go back a few newsletters and find out why it is a far better human way of connecting than a job title)

Now here is the twist, ADMIRATION needs to be GENUINE and RESPECT needs to be CONSCIOUS.

Say this:
“I GENUINELY ADMIRE this about you and I CONSCIOUSLY RESPECT the way you do xyz” (works with your partner, husband, wife, kids, colleague)

Say the words, don’t just assume they know cos you’ve known them forever.

GOAL

To be able to build a team, goals are needed.

If there is no goal, there is no reason to form a team or a partnership in the first place.

Somehow you need me and I need you to achieve this.

I often hear people complaining that it’s hard to stay focused or engaged or aligned because goals keep changing.

You hear: “The goalposts keep changing all the time”.

Goals changing is a good sign of life.

If you are kicking in the same direction all the time to the same goal, you should worry.

The challenge is not that goals change all the time, is that people in the team or the relationship didn’t realise they changed or that one person was targeting this goal over that goal.

The trick is to have COMMON GOALS - and to make them common is not to stop changing them, but actually to change them all the time together, collaboratively, with care, trust, admiration and respect - that’s how you make them common to each other.

There! Have fun thinking deeply about these five principles I always try to use to build teams!

X

G

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