Who Do You Team Up With?

Think Like A Group Winner

Growing up as a kid I discovered how much fun it was playing with the neighborhood kids.  We lived in a very humble neighborhood during a time when all of the people living in that area had little kids they were raising.  The neighborhood always had twenty to twenty five little kids running around.  There were the Snyder's, the Alford's, the Lingo's, the Fredrickson's, the Griffin's, the Putty's, the Cheadle's, our clan of four kids and many more.  They came and they went but always a lot of kids.  It was also the widest collection of youth because it was the peak of the baby boom.  Kids and kid noises everywhere.  Kid stuff was always scattered about the streets where we lived; bicycles, balls, toys, sticks, clothing, shoes and mittens.  Anyone driving a car into our little "circled" culdesac neighborhood would immediately recognize the remnants of children present.  Signals and signs of kids were always strewn about, toys and debris were everywhere.

Playing together in large groups was a common thing to find when we were growing up.  Group activities happened a lot.  We even had big neighborhood parades.  Once in awhile I will bump into a parent from those days past and they will describe how they remember some of our crazy long parades, with flags we used to make.  Some of those folks describe some really funny kid group activities when we get together and reminisce.  Group play was very common stuff.

In fact, some of my best memories include a few of those group things we used to do.  I can make a long list of some of the best group activities like the time when we all gathered together to take lunches we made and go to a nearby hill which had a natural cave at the top.  It was called "Eagles Cave."  We climbed the steep hill with our bikes and lunches tugged along.  Could you imagine seeing the parents watching these 10 to 15 kids doing some of this stuff?  We played together, fought together, had fun together and helped each other manage our challenges together.  Some of our play projects required a pretty large group effort.  I remember some of those group experiences.  We helped each other to play hard.

Now we all live in an independent world.  We take care of ourselves.  We help our own world do what we do to survive and support what we are trying to achieve.  We no longer work in constant groups to achieve our life of existence.  I see one person after another person working to do what they believe they should be doing without any extra effort to include others into the process of what they are doing.  It has become a world of everyone for themselves.  Those past days of everyone playing in large groups are long gone.

Individualism is dominant in our world of work.  One worker stays pretty much out of another co-workers way during the course of a working day.  They only cross paths when the work activities require it.  Otherwise, they do not try to 'team up' on many things.  Employees do not round each other up to do group work.  Our old neighborhood did that kind of rounding up stuff all of the time.  Group stuff is kind of rare in the working world.  Individualism is the dominate pattern.

Our old neighborhood was a rare time when group activities were part of our search for fun.  Group activities had a pleasing desire when we lived in that old neighborhood.  That is no longer the desire of the people who work under the same roof anymore.  It is very rare to have people driving to work with the thought in mind that when they arrive at the place where they work they are going to try and gather a group of co-workers together to accomplish a big project they would like to start.  That is not a common thought in the minds of workers headed to their job.

We are now very individual.  It is troubling to see a group of workers no longer joining together to work on projects of business improvements.  The personal competition is not very lending to this kind of activity.  Groups at work spend more time following than they do at leading, unless they lead only themselves.  Most follow what they think they should be doing and most do what they do in an individual way.  The only time workers team up together is when they are asked to team up together.  Otherwise, they will work individually.  You can see this pattern in your own business model.  Individualism is more common than teaming up to do what needs to be done.  Think about it.  Who do you team up with?  Who is the person that you share a lot of work time with to get the things done that help you to perform better at work?  What groups of people wait for your arrival so they can begin working together on the stuff you guys are trying to achieve?  Your co-workers are not waiting for your arrival, are they.  Each of your co-workers are individually going in to work planning on doing their own direction to do what they think they need to do.

Do not get me wrong, individualism is not a bad thing.  I prefer employees get to it when one of their group members has not yet arrived.  I like the idea of individuals being able to get on with doing some good stuff at work all by themselves.  I like productive people knocking it down by doing a lot of good individual stuff.  That is exactly how very productive business models move forward with their success.  The successful models have learned how to encourage, train and support the great efforts their individuals do.  It is one of the good marks their model performs.

However, what about team play?  How well does your business model perform when it comes time to join together in small teams to perform a group project?  Do your employees and staff have the skills to perform group success?  If not, why not?  What does your business model accidentally do to omit the possibility of this to happen?  Are you the type of leader who cannot work in groups to help each other perform at a higher level of success?  Is your leadership style defined in such a way that individualism rules how you play?  Does it rule how you work?  Does it dominate how you think?  Who do you team up with?

Think This Through!

Give this kind of thinking a chance.  Spend the next week during your working efforts to squeeze in a little group project planning.  Try to think of something small that a group of workers you employ could do to rally together to perform a single task in a group way.  It might be a promotional effort.  It might something designed to build a better attraction improvement project.  It might be a marketing idea to a newly designed campaign.  It might be a parking lot re-adjustment project.  It might be planning a company employee event.  Think of something that will help the idea to have group work become a good learning ground for larger future uses.  Start to develop the group working together skills in your staff.  Start simple and do one little project together.

Remember this.  If each employee held a small half inch stick that was three feet long, could anyone bend that stick enough to break it?  Of course they could.  It would break quite easily.  What if all of your employees had the same size stick?  Could all of them be broken by bending them in half?  Of course they could.  Now picture how hard it would be to break those sticks if they were all tied together in one bunch.  It would not be as easy to do.  Your group of employees is no different that those sticks.  Although the group dynamics will be challenging to manage, the results of building good teams will be a permanent part of your business model success.  Your model will have a new and stronger set of characteristics that the competition will be hard pressed to break apart.  Learn how to tie your employees together better than you are doing individually.  The potential to strengthen your results will improve.

When you first begin to develop group play, it will have some bumpy starts.  Individualism is rooted very deeply in our society.  The normal patterns of individual work and play are streaming along without group interference.  Once you introduce group efforts, the activities will seem strange to the individuals you select.  As a result, when you start developing some group work, do not make a big issue about it being a group deal.  Some will come to help, some will not.  Do not measure who comes and who does not.  Individual roots are very deeply set.  They will not easily loop around a group idea very quickly.  Be patient with your group training.  It is also important that you operate this project in a stealth fashion.  If the individuals know that you are trying to develop stronger group team play, those individuals will delight in making sure you fail.  If that is the case, do not even start up some group developments.  You may discover it is doomed before it hit the runway.  If you broadcast the idea of group play as your goal, you may never get it off the ground.  Go stealth at first.

Pull out your electronic calender.  Take the next six months and mark in three simple group projects.  Space them out equally.  Do not start one before the other one is finished.  Start describing the work you want done on those three simple projects.  Describe only one of them at a time.  Find a fair leader, maybe not the best leader but a fair one.  Hand the project over to them to head up and have them find a couple of other employees to join in and do the project together.  Announce this simple task to the whole group but specifically make it known who will be selecting the team players to help them out.  Tell your selected leader that you want to know who they select to help them before they get going on the project.  Give them just enough details about the project description and allow them some room to create the balance of what needs to be done.  Have them work that project with a specific and known deadline in place.  Now sit back and allow them to battle their way to its end.

The moment that project is about to wrap up, do the same thing on the second project you defined.  Now select a different fair leader to head up that second one.  Follow the same procedure.  Make adjustments were you found them to be needed when the first project was set in place.  Leave room for making proper adjustments within your groups.  Not all groups behave exactly the same.  Make sure the provisions and adjustments you introduce refrain from offering favoritism or special care, however.  The group work needs to remain steady on equal grounds.  The employees will use the experience as a means to compare and to compete.  You need to protect against some unwanted unfairness and collateral damage.  People can be cruel.  It is in their nature.  Accept it and move on.  Protect the ugly stuff from happening.

Once you see the light of the end of the second project, do the same kind of steps to introduce the third project.  By now, the employees have it in their minds that you are leading them in some very different ways.  They will start to second guess your style of leadership and begin to try and be 'right' in what they think you are trying to achieve.  On the third project of introduction, ask them who they think should lead the third group project.  Go with their choice.  This will help to neutralize some funky group dynamics that are trying to surface.  It is normal stuff.  Do not rub against it.  Allow the group to begin forming its own pattern of leadership.  This is a very normal and in the future, a very good thing.  You are now on the new path of developing some group efforts to success.

This kind of effort will not be easy to manage.  However, once you learn how to manage group success, your organization will be much more difficult for the competition to move ahead.  The bonds, ideas and the collective work that the groups will eventually learn how to do will provide some very cool productivity to your arsenal of organizational success.  It will take years to become very strong as a group of successful people working on huge group projects with a lot of group success.  Make sure you know and deliver appropriate rewards to those who perform the best.  Give them some of the company returns that were produced by the efforts they collectively directed.  You will not be disappointed in that effort.  It is not only the right thing to do, it is the best thing to do.  Become a 'best practices' leader.

The next time you see the question, "Who do you team up with?"  You will immediately know how to answer that question.  Your organization will be clearly defined and the sticks will already be tied together.  You will no longer be afraid of one stick being broken.

Until next time...