Rebellious Thoughts #44 - 🤘 Spontaneous Care

Hey Rebels!

I didn’t write a newsletter last week! You may or may not have noticed… (hey, have you noticed?!)

It was my son’s 18th birthday and my sister was in town and I prioritised family and friends over anything else. So apologies if you were hanging for it!

This week I’m going to step out of the structure (read my previous emails HERE) and share with you an observation I made a long time ago as I was exploring the fabric of high-performing teams.

I was obsessed with understanding the elements that make a team’s output orders of magnitude larger than the sum of its parts.

Among a number of elements I always call out, CARE to me is the fundamental building block required to pull together a high-performing team.

Without care, there is no foundation on which to build.

These are the 3 care factors I believe are the most important:

1) Care for yourself:
First and foremost, each team member needs to have a reasonable understanding of self-care.
How do I ensure I provide myself with the necessary pieces like sleep, food, distraction, entertainment, etc to stay as balanced and capable of performing at my average best* as possible.

2) Care for each other:
How do I keep an eye on those around me and help them plug the gaps they may not be entirely aware of.
“Let’s go for a walk” is sometimes the kind of suggestion you need and not “let’s check how we are doing against KPIs”

3) Care for the customer:
Making the customer happy, seeing the customer delighted because you managed to help them must create a positive response in you.
If fixing the customer problem makes you feel nothing there’s an issue.

Dozens of other elements are important (product, space, competitors, market, stakeholders, etc) - but these to me are the ones that make the main difference.

Your salary is an important driver, but feeling amazing about helping your team or not disappointing them is an even more powerful driver.
Focus people on each other and the customer.

Now here is the trouble with all of the above.

You may look at your business or the company you work for and observe there are hundreds of processes and systems in place for this “care” to happen.

To make it regular and consistent. “We care for our people by providing a safe place to work blah blah”

Important, but not enough.

The challenge with regular consistent care is that it becomes invisible.

We stop noticing care that happens all the time. It happens in businesses it happens in partnerships, friendships, marriages.

Care becomes expected and it loses its powerful incentive.

I remember learning this with an experiment.
I started buying fruit every couple of days and putting it in a fruit bowl accessible to all the people in the team.
People sent messages and loved the fruit bowl, they even contributed fruit to it. It was a great gesture of care - but eventually, it started to slowly disappear and become an expectation.
Same happened with cakes, I used to bake for my team but eventually when it became regular and expected it lost its power.

So I realised that regular consistent care is important but not enough, you need to throw into the mix SPONTANEOUS CARE - acts of random kindness that make people snap out of their realities and notice.

So here is your challenge…. surprise yourself with a spontaneous act of self-care! Do something for yourself you don’t normally do (like your teeth!).
Do the same for friends or family or work colleagues… pay attention to the impact, to the sudden attention you bring to the act and the response people have.

Let me know how you go!

Love

Gus

P.S. Update on the last newsletter’s challenge… Remember?
I said that if we got at least 50 sign-ups, I would launch the Rebellious Thought Sessions… a series of FREE monthly talks where I’ll free flow, share radical ideas and more!
Okay.. the update is that we got 57 signups! YEW!!!! So more news on this coming soon!
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My recommendations:

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What?

This:

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