Why you should think about taking down your power poster.
1) Teamwork will only work if the people are on board.
- If you don’t recognize yourself as a team member or you aren’t a team player it is difficult to be on a team.
- If you think that everyone on your team is stupid, you probably won’t work well with them.
- If you don’t want to participate because you don’t like teams, it probably won’t work out.
2) Teamwork isn’t just an image on a poster.
- A man walks in a room and on the wall is a poster of a bunch of dudes rowing a boat in the same direction. What the poster didn’t say was that all these guys like boat rowing, they are all fit, and they are all looking to win a physical trophy and a date. In other words, they have a lot in common!
3) You don’t like sports.
- You ever notice that people who don’t like sports are kind of averse to team work.
4) You don’t have a coach.
- Teams need a coach and a captain if you don’t have either, it probably won’t work.
5) When leaders talk about teamwork but they are really lying and you know it.
Often times we think that teamwork is critical to the success of an organization. I have thought it, and I have been guilty of feeling that teamwork in a lot of instances was stupid as well. You ever sit in the back of the room and watch everyone? Sometimes it is like watching a television show. Every actor is playing their role. At the same time watching them never made me feel smarter than anyone. It wasn’t about being smart; it was and is for me about getting the work done.
Most people want to find ways to either work less or work themselves into a different job. If you are looking for the next team to work on, how can you have any allegiance to the team you are supposedly on?
I don’t really have lots of answers, I do have questions. More often than not I am reading what I should and shouldn’t do. There are five ways to work effectively with a team or ten ways to shut up and color with your teammates. I like reading those articles and lists but none of it seem practical. I have tried in a lot of ways to practice the suggestions and guidance. What I am saying is behavior and culture is extremely important. That being said, sometimes what you do won’t matter and you will be on a team. They will label you as something and you will be that something because that is the persona they gave you. This isn’t a Myers-Briggs situation where you take the test and you are an INTJ or whatever. This is what you have been labeled by people who may not even know you.
What can you do?
A man goes to his doctor and says “Doc, I have a rash, what can I do about it?” Doctor says “I don’t know!” More often than not every situation is different, there isn’t one thing that you can do to solve the problem. Business like medicine is a practice. You have to put your big boy or girl undies on and figure it out. If you can’t fit in with the team or group, you need to decide if you are going to stay or leave. That isn’t easy as a matter of fact it may be really hard. For that you might just have to shut up and color.
The Cohenization Project 
The first thing in forming a team is to realize we are all on the team called the human race. Once we start from that position, we then can get to the next level and that is what is it that we as human’s have in common and what is it that we human’s want to solve. If we find we have differences in opinions about what we want and how to solve, it should start a dialog that should lead to some resolution or not. Once we have a resolution that we agree upon, then we should be able to start a teaming action, but if we don’t, then we need to back away and regroup. The problem is that many of us are in situations before we can get to the human side of things first as we take a job based on some premise or other reasoning which had hidden agendas that we didn’t know about. It is like stepping into a mine field. A team needs not to all think alike but all have to have the same objective and when personal objectives do not fit with the team we are counterproductive for the team. Teaming has to have a purpose, just like getting married, you have a purpose for getting married; you love someone else besides yourself and want to share your life and maybe have a family. If one of you didn’t want this and you knew up front, then you most likely wouldn’t have gotten married. Many people think they can change the other person, so they marry thinking the objectives will change later, but that is exactly like taking the job thinking we can change it knowing full well that it is an uphill battle. My suggestion would be to always be very forward and upfront right out of the gate, and expose any hidden agendas before we commit. This isn’t easy and we sometimes feel that by our exposure we lose any advantage as others now know just who we are and what we want, but it saves us the headaches later when we find that it wasn’t a good fit.
LikeLike
🙂 Happy Sunday !
LikeLike