If you can do it alone then do it alone, great teams have great purposes.
I’m a huge advocate of teams. “Teams always achieve more than individuals” This is one of my favourite quotes that form the foundation of my viewpoint in any space where I get back to talk about teams, whether it’s team building, team space, or even an answer to a question in an interview about what sort of team player I am. When I want to see good quality work or the best outcome come out from a group of people it’s always about how can we actually work together as a team to be able to do this.
In 2017, we had our team closing with our team coach. We were all sharing our experiences in the past year, everything that we gained, the highs, the lows and what we were taking away from working one year with each other. After we had all finished debriefing our experiences as a team, he said something along these lines. “Remember this team experience. Make this the standard that you now need to have in any teams that you have after this. Utilise it as your benchmark whatever you do next” Now when this coach, whom I greatly respect, says jump, my immediate response is how high? But in all seriousness, I did do exactly what he said. It became my inner compass, it became a benchmark for me. I took the best of it, of what it meant to be a good team leader, of what it meant to be a good team member, I thought of all the ways that we communicated and worked with one another that made us such a high-performing team and bought it to every team that I’ve been part of since, whether as a team member or a team leader.
It sounds like I’m a broken record preaching about the benefits of teams. I wasn’t always like this though. I had spent most of my life not like this. I use to think that things are more efficient when you just do them yourselves, asking for help is a weakness, don’t make mistakes, everything should be great the first time that you do it, talking with others, collaborating, asking for input is just over complicating and just making things harder than what they would need to be. We all have made memes about group assignments, about the person that doesn’t do anything, about each other carrying each other’s weight, usually one person just does it because that’s just easier. Even if the end outcome is satisfactory or it meets the minimum objectives, then you still didn’t maximise the opportunity that this was to be able to learn, to grow, to wider your perspective and thoughts to see how things can be done, it could have easily moved to be something great.
It’s great if you want to work by yourself for the rest of your life, then yes, you only need to be good at individual work, however, if that is not the case then the faster you master teamwork, working with others, working together, the happier you will be. Inspiring change, creating change and executing change requires knowing how to work with people. If you’re in a team, it’s because you can’t do it alone. The purpose or objective or mission or however you want to call it about why your team exists requires collective strengths and talents to see it through. If you can do it alone then do it alone, great teams have great purposes. Purposes that require multiple perspectives, strengths and diversity that no one person can have. Purposes that require the strategy and execution that no one person can have.
I will credit a lot of who I am today to the people that I was fortunate enough to have on the same team as me. I remember all these people that I learnt from even though for many of them, we’ve only ever worked together for a year, however, that year was enough. That’s the intensity and the magic that aiesec can give you if you choose or allow it to. When I think of my own personal journey of learning certain skills sets or competencies, I think of certain people that inspired or influenced my journey:
- one person taught me the importance of business acumen,
- one person taught me the importance of design
- one person set the benchmark of generosity,
- one person showed me how normal vulnerability is
- another power of introverted leadership,
- another taught me about storytelling,
- another about how to create a sense of belonging,
- another about reporting and analysis,
- another about survey design and user experience,
- another about how to host and have hard conversations,
- another about what it means to stand alone,
- another about what it means to be authentic,
- another about what it means to have integrity.
It wasn’t just role-specific qualities or skill sets, however, it was also about behaviours that can always help you to better work together with different people and approach work from a different perspective. This is not an exhaustive list, I could not count and identify everything that I’ve gained and from who I have gained in the past few years. We are all an accumulation of the people that we have crossed paths with.
In the past 11 years, I’ve been part of over 15 teams. A great team experience for me is how we all work together to achieve our goals. I define working together as knowing both our strengths as individuals and also our strengths specifically as members of the team. We knew what each of us bought to the table and what each of us bought during each part of the process of achieving the end goal. E.g. when there is a setback, when someone makes a mistake, or when someone needs to take personal time off. We knew what it meant to support each other, and support looks different depending on the situation and what the person needs. Do they need you to be a cheerleader or a challenger right now?
My biggest successes and misses when it came to the difference between a high-performing team and an average team or even a team that is only a team on paper are:
- Expectations need to be clear during the recruitment and selection process of the team. What is the purpose of the team? What is the context that the team is working in and responding to either internally or externally? What is a non-negotiable that has already been set? What is the scope of influence that the team members have when it comes to it?
- You can’t be a good team member of the team if you’re not what the team actually needs at that moment, in that context. That’s why expectations need to be clear, not because you will recruit or select people who will deliver 100% of the time but because it means you know why your team exist and therefore by default you will already know one non-negotiable. You all have one thing that brings you all together.
- Strive for learning, not perfection. It works two ways, the more you grow, develop, and put in, the stronger the team will become and there the more the team will be able to achieve. Embrace a culture of continuous learning and support.
- Make space for people to be people. If you don’t plan time for it to happen people will take the time to make it happen regardless. Make time for people to be humans. The best teams are when you see people as people before you see them as the “tools” for you to be able to achieve. Most of the time it’s not because people don’t want to do their job but rather because they’re just not ready to meet that moment yet. Make space in the way that you design your JD, your timeline and deliverables so that people can actually help one another, people can pitch in, have enough mental energy left to deal with something that is happening in their personal life, show someone at work how to do something even if it’s not in their JD, learn from each other, have time to implement feedback as well as have time to give constructive growth and encouraging feedback.
- There is no SOP when it comes to building a high-performing team. You can not standardize and process optimise everything because you’re working with people, not machines. e.g you can’t make the perfect performance management tool, it’s physically impossible to measure every positive behaviour, but rather it’s about how you can do your best to build a culture where people encourage each other to be ideal team players.
These are just my biggest learnings and they complement or overlap with many high-performing teams methodologies, frameworks and assessments that you would see out there. There are some assessments and frameworks that are better grounded with data than others. However, the way that I like to look at all these tools is the fact that they provide a common starting point and language for you to really assess and reflect for yourself on the role that you’ve been playing in the team, what the team has been doing and what could make the team better.
A great team experience is one where everyone is clear on the end goal, they all have their connection and maybe different reasons why achieving it matters to them & they utilise the team's strengths to get there. The journey of fulfilling the goal (the purpose of the team) is just as fulfilling if not more fulfilling as the goal itself. When I think back to the best team experiences that I’ve been a part of, I remember the goals, I remember what we needed to do, I remember why our team existed, I remember what were the challenges that were unique to the context that we were part of. However, I also equally remember feeling safe, supported, feeling that someone had my back, I had their back and that we could show up as ourselves, ask for help, and receive help.
Even though there were so many people that I’ve stayed friends with after our time working together. We’ve gone to each other's weddings, we’ve been on trips together, or even just making jokes on our Whatsapp groups. I’ve long realised that it’s never going to be the same as us being in a team working together on achieving something that mattered to us at that moment in time. Those moments were priceless, they don’t come twice, so be grateful and make the most of them when you get the chance. I’m grateful I did.
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‘My time actively working on youth leadership development in aiesec are behind me, however, the principles that I’ve shared in this 11-part blog series will always be a part of me’
