How can a team to be more than the sum of its parts? Well, maybe stop thinking of it as discrete math?!
Approaching a team sport, as an individual
As you may already know, I’m a curler. When I was learning the sport, I brought my engineering mind to it. That helped me figure out the physical mechanics but it also gave me a very narrow perspective of team mechanics. The written rules clearly defined each of the four positions, and I was determined to pour my attention into my responsibilities. I truly believed, that if I did my part well, and everyone else did their parts well, then we’d win some games.
As you can guess, that approach did NOT win many games yet alone tournaments.
Going beyond our individual roles
Something started to change. A fellow player asked me if different words might work better to express the speed of the stone. I asked a teammate to look at my sweeping to help me choose an adjustment to get more pressure on the broom.
We weren’t innovating the sport, but we were innovating how we played it. We were starting to experiment outside of our individual roles. Our win percentage did get better! But more importantly, we felt like we were stronger players when we played together. And we had more fun. This lead to more creativity, more trust, more experimentation…and eventually we weren’t four random individuals. We were one unique team.
Gotta love the lessons we learn through sport!
Exercise for teamwork muscle
So here’s an exercise to strengthen your teamwork muscle:
- First identify a team you’re actively part of this week.
- Maybe you’re playing a sport, or working on a big proposal, or developing a virtual event
- Then, identify one way another member of the team could contribute to what you’re doing.
- Maybe it’s to read over something, to watch your form, or to brainstorm with you
- I’m not saying to just delegate or hand something off
- The key here is to make it an enhancement that you can’t quite do all on your own
- I also want you to feel good about your deadlines, so keep it something small that can be done in a short amount of time
- Some more examples might be to role play a conversation, to cross-check some calculations, or to do a test run
- Next, pick a specific teammate
- Maybe it’s a peer, or someone who reports to you, or an intern
- Then, directly ask if they will help you in this specific way
- At the end of the week notice:
- Which parts of the exercise were easy?
- Which parts were more difficult?
- Which part surprised you the most?
- Consider how one collaborative exchange may have strengthened you as well as the team.
