INSPIRED TEAMS ENERGY

Imagine a team where you feel joy and are fully committed to the work; a team where your teammates support you to be your full and best self. This is an Inspired Team that generates Energy. Unfortunately, such teams are rare but they don’t have to be.

This article was written by Dr. Steven Wolff, author of Inspired Teams, a team-based survey featured on Comparative Agility.

It is easy to agree that good teams are joyful and members are committed and engaged. The more difficult thing is to actually build such a culture. Have you ever been frustrated with the advice you have read on how to build your team? Either it leaves you asking, “How exactly do I do that?”
For example, how exactly do you build safety. Or, there are steps you can implement, yet progress is short-lived, or even worse, non-existent.

While observations of what highly effective teams do can be helpful, they can also create a lot of frustration because they don’t identify the deeper state of Being from which the observed patterns of behavior arise. I am a very practical person and have spent my career trying to understand the source from which desired behaviors emerge. What I have discovered is that the team we experience is generated from the agreements and conversations among team members.

Based on my research and that of others, plus practical experience, the following discussion focuses on four main areas of agreement and conversation that help teams generate Energy: Purpose, Acceptance, Understanding, and Caring.

There are three levels of conversation: team, individual, and leader. The main conversation is the one had by the team; however, each member, including the leader, contributes to the team’s culture.
The questions at these levels are intended for self-reflection.

Purpose

Purpose and Acceptance give work meaning. Think about the activities you are willing to put your energy into. When you are fully committed, you have a purpose and you find ways to fulfill it. If the purpose is compelling enough, you may put in long hours without any return other than the satisfaction you get from your contribution to the cause.

Inspired Teams create a compelling purpose that team members commit to; the purpose creates a “game worth playing” and provides a sense of integration where members feel they are contributing to something larger than themselves

In addition to energizing members, teams use the purpose to help prioritize and evaluate decisions.
This helps the team align effort, focus on high value-added work, and reduce work that produces little or no value.

Acceptance

When crafting roles, Inspired Teams recognize the uniqueness of each member and find ways to use each person’s full set of capabilities. This provides a sense of differentiation whereby members feel they can be their full and true selves in the team. People are no longer “checking their brains at the door” when they enter the workplace, as one manager I spoke to put it. And, they are not afraid to bring all aspects of who they are into the workplace; they are free to be authentic. Not only is this very energizing, it also taps into a huge well of potential that often lies dormant.

The team needs to have conversations and make agreements about how people want to contribute. Do they have talents and aspirations that are tucked away because the “role” does not require them? Likewise, team members have an obligation to speak up about their aspirations and what energizes them.

Understanding

Understanding and Caring generate connection. If I had to identify the single most important set of agreements and conversations contributing to team effectiveness, it would be Understanding.
From my experience, the largest source of team dysfunction is that members don’t understand the challenges, pressures, concerns, experience, and perspective of their teammates. This leads to creating “stories” that, more often than not, are not grounded. It is only when the team builds a shared understanding of reality that it can move to the highest levels of performance.

Understanding is not necessarily a personal form of knowing each other, although it can be if the team chooses. It is about knowing enough so members can work together, support each other, and allow each member to be fully expressed.

Caring

Once a team has a compelling shared purpose, understands each other, and crafts roles that allow full expression, members need to have conversations about how to support each other to be his/her best. Caring involves both support and demonstrating mutual respect, appreciation, and validation. It means that if a team member is struggling, the team accepts responsibility and works to help the person succeed. Think about times when you were supported when you were struggling, it creates a very powerful emotional bond; it is very energizing.

You now have an understanding of the conversations and agreements that help create a culture that generates Energy. To use this information, you need to be able to sense when your team culture is not generating energy so you can start the appropriate conversation.

In a nutshell, in a culture that generates energy, you feel energized. You feel joy and that you are being supported to be your best. You wake up in the morning wanting to get to work. A team culture that generates energy has members with passion. The language used in teams that generate energy is about “we” and supporting each other. The mission of the team is referred to and used to make decisions. The language of a team that is not generating energy sounds like a bunch of lost souls struggling to find their way.

To assess whether your teams are average or Inspired — and identify where you need to make improvements — take the Inspired Teams assessment right now and take an intentional approach to continuous improvement.