There is No I in Team

In a world where we seem to worship individuals, teamwork seems to be in 2nd place. Rather than focusing on the way a team finds synergy and can create all the requirements for success, we gravity to picking out individuals from that team and attributing the whole win to him or her. It starts at a young age, when we are bombarded with the idea we should all find an idol we look up to, to very specific questions in business training where we get the occasional: “if you could have dinner with someone …”-a question that is always asked in a way we expect the answer to be a singular person.

Stop Wanting To Be More

No wonder we are left with the notion that we should be able to do everything ourselves, and well. That goes from being able to maintain a career and have children. Or even worse, the guilt of being at home taking care of the children and feeling you don’t do enough at work. Or vice versa. The one feeling being even worse than the other. Or what about the pressure of being on par with every quality of a person you encounter? Meet a numbers whizz, yes you could do that! Meet someone that has a mentoring spark, yes you can do that as well! What about that person with that visionary plan? Yes, you can do that too. We have been conditioned to worship of the best qualities in one individual in such a way we are looking for it in ourselves. Especially in the work environment.

From Superhero To Glue

But that doesn’t need to be the case. After all, it’s extremely tiring, the point it will be an endless pursuit of stretching yourself and your skillset to the point where you won’t be able to recognize yourself. As soon as you accept, you don’t need to be, everything is the point where you can go upwards again. The point is that people will all have certain strengths others won’t be able to copy. Bringing all those talents together and making them shine is your purpose. That’s where you go from “just” a manager to a manager of high performing teams.

Help

Successful managers focus on two things: “being the glue” and timing. Getting the right people at the same time in the room gets you ahead. Making the experts gel with each other, and providing a stage for each one to display their added value is a vital element of what you are trying to achieve. This is also linked to knowing when you have the talent in-house or knowing when you need to shop around. You might know you have the best customer service people to deal with those negative complaints, but you also know you don’t have the required skillset within the team to deal with a coordinated slander campaign. This is when hiring a business litigation attorney might be the best course of action. Because it’s safe to assume we don’t know everything and sometimes we need help.