Team resilience is not just survival. It is changing the rules of your fitness. And this goes beyond adaptation. Team resilience is nurtured, not bought just as true grit is nurtured, not bought.
It’s tuning your team so that it adapts to a new reality. One that’s tougher, meaner, against you. Team resilience is all about moving along this new reality.
Team resilience is what makes the difference in businesses all over the world. Even at startup level, businesses go through severe perturbations. From competition, both fair and unfair, to the occasional paradigm shift. Anything that happens outside and inside a business can ultimately affect the team.
And it’s team resilience that makes or breaks team success. Team resilience is the latent ability that allows a team to deal with a major obstacle. It is the ability to respond to a hitting a wall by regrouping and running through it.
As fast-paced and technology driven as the modern workplace might be, distractions and interruptions still manage to keep us still, slowing down our productivity. “Friendly” notifications that pop up everywhere and at any time, teammates who constantly ask for help or feedback, the continuous battle for balance between being able to do our job and working together with the team for a common purpose — known as teamwork — all that puts enormous pressure on our work and focus.
Team chemistry is the first to blame when it comes to team performance. You have scouted for leading talent. And you have recruited the best. Also, you have done a lot of other things.
Yet it seems that your team does not click. After all this effort, the performance is subpar. And it feels like buying a Ferrari that drives like a used Civic. What needs to change? And what can you do? Either pour more in, or try again. However, the issues remain. And there is a huge list of things to tap.
At work, as well as in life, knowing what drives people can help determine where they’re heading. No wonder that HR departments focus so much on why people made certain decisions. After all, intrinsic motivation is the most descriptive element of why people do what they do. This is becoming the utmost determinant of professional success, for several good reasons.
Motivation is more than a way to determine what a person is like. Understanding motivation can help you better cultivate passion and dedication. It can enable you to develop personal and professional meaningfulness. Moreover, it offers contextualization in understanding actors and strategies, pivoting, and repositioning. It provides an exceptional way to develop yourself and others.
Every work day finds us focusing on our projects, striving to meet deadlines and finish tasks before we leave the office. But that’s not all we do, is it? We also spend a lot of time helping teammates who need our advice and input. Most often, we’re eager to help. But at the end of the day, when we realize we didn’t meet that deadline or we’re not even half way through that critical task, we have mixed feelings. Helping teammates felt good, but it took too much of our time and energy, and we neglected our work.
So, what motivates us to jump in and help, and how can we do it while staying productive?
Photo by Rémi Walle on Unsplash
He may not be a 20-year-old millionaire from the Silicon Valley, but Sir Alex Ferguson is definitely a leader worth studying. For over 25 years, he was the man behind Manchester United’ triumph, which made the world recognize him as the most successful football manager in British history.
Image Source: DailyMail.co.uk