Tips for Fostering Teamwork Instead of Office Politics

Teamwork is a system you design, not a speech you give.   What do teams need?   💎 Speaking up.   Teams need people willing to speak up when they sense a problem or opportunity. Leaders must set these conditions by "listening with the will to learn." It is easy to speak up when you have confidence your perspective matters and your voice will be heard. Ask yourself this honest question: do you need more telling from your boss or more listening?   💎 Disagreeing well.   High-performing teams -engineer- constructive conflict. They separate critique of ideas from critique of people, surface dissent early, and close with unity. Practiced respectfully, debate becomes a rehearsal for crisis: it strengthens bravery, kills artificial harmony, and turns meetings from boring "status theater" into advantage generators.   💎 Showing love.   The L-word at work. Cringe. Maybe not good timing after that Coldplay kiss-cam video. Teams need people who feel the professional love of their leaders. Showing professional love is learning who they are and saying it to them in the way they can hear it and understand it. Its not just recognition or celebrating a milestone, its true compromise to demonstrate the team is bigger than any one of us, including the leader. You want people all in? Show - repeatedly - that you are all in on them.   💎 Instilling ownership.   Teams need people who feel the autonomy, mastery and purpose of their work. Instilling ownership means engineering the conditions for intrinsic motivation: explicit decision rights, co-created outcome metrics, and context transparency. Add small discretionary budgets and rotating stewardship roles so many people get to exercise judgment. Shift your default response to escalations from giving answers to asking: What do you recommend? And why?   💎 Nothing time.   Teams need downtime because that's how relationships extend beyond work and beyond the field. Travel together. Goof off. Host a team meal with no business, just spending time together and having laughs. Do things together to create common experiences and inside jokes. Skip the temptation to over-orchestrate offsites. Help your team build camaraderie before you need it. You will know how connected to each other they are when times get tough.   What teams need is a systematic approach to high performance and fulfillment.   What is on your wish list as a team member? What does your team need?   Backstory: I was inspired to write on teams as this week had several milestones: mid-year self-assessments for myself and my global team, final game of the regular season for a team I oversee, final tournament of a team I recently retired from, time with extended family in a mini-reunion, planning a presentation to the Board on AI, guiding sub-teams on AI Governance, observing increasing dysfunction and polarization in public forums. They look and sound different but there are common threads. That's what emerged for me this week, which became this post. 

I love to make up words that fill in the gaps in the English language. Even though our dictionary has more than 200,000 words, it’s not enough. I love my wife. I love hot dogs. We need more words for love. So I’m working on my own dictionary. Sometimes I modify an existing word or couple two existing words to create a third meaning. For example: Ø Prosilience: Prospective resilience, developing mental toughness before being called upon to need it. Ø Focish: Focusing on what’s important and finishing what you start. Ø Nedlog Rule: The Golden Rule in reverse – anything you would be willing to do for someone else if they asked you, be willing to ask for that same help if you need it. Ø ExGen: Being extravagantly generous in small ways. Today I’m working on a new word: Teampathy. We’ve all heard and used the word teamwork – to work together as a team. Teampathy means fostering empathy within the team. It is an essential complement to team work. According to Gallup, one of the best predictors of employee engagement is having good friends at work. One of the vital catalysts of friendship is mutual empathy. Working together (teamwork) will help the organization hit targets and achieve goals, but it will not in itself foster meaningful friendships. That requires Teampathy. Especially today when burnout, moral distress, and the emotional drain of social and political polarization can be so wearing, leaders need to consciously promote a spirit of mutual empathy. Here are three practical suggestions for fostering Teampathy. Suggestion #1: Increase cultural intolerance for toxic emotional negativity. Bullying, rumor-mongering, and belittling criticism are dispiriting and demoralizing and contribute to a culture of distrust and “not my job” apathy. Download the free DIY Implementation Guide at www.PicklePledge.com to share The Pickle Pledge and the Pickle Challenge for Charity with your team. This is the most powerful and effective tool I have for raising awareness of and intolerance for chronic complaining, pessimism, and learned helplessness. Suggestion #2: Encourage peer-to-peer recognition, gratitude, and encouragement. The DAISY Foundation, Wambi, and NDORSE are platforms that make it easy for people to appreciate their colleagues. Suggestion #3: Make better use of daily team huddles (or start doing them if you are not already). Encourage people to share personal stories, publicly recognize a coworker, or ask for support. Do something fun. Get people to laugh (you don’t need to be a comedian to tap into the power of laughter – google Laughter Yoga). Working on Teampathy might do more for teamwork in your organization than working on teamwork will do.