Companies all around the world go above and beyond to build strong teams capable of performing difficult tasks with the minimum amount of resources, in the shortest possible time. That is the very definition of productivity. All leaders and managers know that having people work together means enhanced problem-solving capabilities and greater potential for innovation. And this is how team building activities were born.
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.
Team collaboration is what makes a team. Without it, you don’t have a team. Instead, you have a bunch of people working at the same time. However, true teams do more. They use collaboration to synergize.
Be that as it may, collaboration is not an intrinsic human need or priority. In fact, we learn to collaborate. And it’s a difficult process. This process has helped us achieve a lot. Most modern achievements are the result of collaboration.
Sure, you can cultivate greatness without collaboration. While writing poetry as a team might be fun, this is a one-person job. Also, a lot of other activities are not team activities. And that’s fine.
Team collaboration can be a metric on which you benchmark productivity. Yet, we should not confuse regular productivity with synergized productivity. In synergized productivity, the overall result is greater than the sum of inputs. Work has a final result of a value superior to the elements of work. For example, a Tesla S is greater than the sum of its parts. Yet, people could be very productive producing the parts. In this case, there is no added value, no synergy.
Goals, productivity, and teams. What could be the secret ingredient that binds these three? We admire those that inspire. And nothing inspires us more than the pursuit of greatness. Tenacity. Resilience. The ability to keep going, no matter what. And it is people like these that we want to lead us. It’s no surprise that we tend to follow those who persevere.
Training is a key component of personnel and personal development. In some cases, it may be the reason people choose to work for your business. Trainings are crucial to the development of new teams, and the elixir for the rejuvenation of old ones. Yet, trainings should take into account the way adults learn.
I strongly believe in the power of the right people in the right place. For a startup, this makes the difference between life and death. While there aren’t two startups alike, the things I will talk about in this article apply to all of them.
I was fortunate enough to learn a lot of things the hard way and I want to share them with both early entrepreneurs and people who are wasting their potential instead of joining a startup.
A week ago, everyone at 4PSA (well, almost everyone – as some of us had to stay in the office and keep an eye on things) were off to nowhere, i.e. Rucar, bonding with the team, trying to know each other even better, and cultivating that spirit of togetherness that makes things move, while having fun.