Above All Else, page 23
Arizona Airspeed’s success was largely a result of having two veterans and three newer competitors. The younger teammates bring new fire and energy to the team. They are absolutely convinced that they can and will win and can’t even imagine that anything will stand in their way.
Their expectations of themselves and the team are high, but often unrealistic, their efforts sometimes misguided. They pour out their hearts and souls but don’t see the immediate results they were expecting. In the face of certain setbacks, their unbridled enthusiasm may soon become hampered by discouragement and doubt. They become very frustrated and don’t realize that even on the best team, frustration is part of the game.
The more seasoned teammate has the experience to help the younger team members direct their energies and put their focus in the right areas. They can offer more realistic expectations, keep things in perspective, and minimize frustration.
On the other hand, without the influence of their younger teammates, the veterans may become somewhat complacent. They don’t recognize if they have lost that competitive fire until they see the same fire in their younger teammates’ eyes. The enthusiasm the younger teammates bring to the team serves to remind the more experienced teammate of how they used to be, how they used to feel. And in doing so, it rejuvenates that fire and passion in them.
The veterans have been there before. They know what systems work but are likely to be somewhat set in their ways. The rookies bring new ideas and the confidence to try them, ideas that might have been prejudged or never even considered if not for the blind ambition and confidence of the younger team members.
In addition, as long as you don’t mind the terms “punk” and “dinosaur,” these relationships can provide fuel for some of the best harassment-based humor a team has to work with. The inner competition between these teammates, and the laughs that go along with it, will provide never-ending fun and entertainment.
A hard-ass and a comedian. On the best teams I have seen there has usually been a hard-ass, someone that demands each teammate to be disciplined and pushes everyone every step of the way. This is often thought of as a needed personality, but left on its own it can cause too much tension and stress within the team. It is important the team be disciplined and focused, but at times it is just as important that the team doesn’t take itself too seriously. We must be able to maintain our sense of humor and the ability to laugh at ourselves and each other. Every hard-ass needs a comedian. But you can’t make a joke out of everything. Every comedian needs a hard-ass.
Different approaches to training (planning) and communicating. There are two general common teammate personality types: those that are loose and playful, and those that tend to be more serious and uptight. Either one of these on its own may have a negative impact on the team. But together, they keep the team in check, always providing whatever positive influence is needed given what the moment calls for.
In competition, there are often times when a team needs to loosen up and relax. Other situations, more frequently in training, demand the team to tighten up and get down to business. For a team to stay cool and maintain that laser-tight focus under all circumstances, they need both. The combination of these personalities helps the team to be emotionally balanced instead of overly emotional.
Being part of a team that is trying to achieve great things provides an amazing opportunity for personal growth. We will be faced with many obstacles, one of the strongest being negative psychological barriers we impose on ourselves. As teammates, we must help and support each other to overcome obstacles like self-doubt and concern of how other people perceive us. That support could come in the form of compassion, toughness, or humor. We may be in need of a hug, a joke, or a good kick in the ass. If a team is made of all like individuals, then we only have access to one type of support, one perspective of how best to handle any given situation. And one perspective, no matter which one it is, won’t be enough to succeed and grow.
Friends as Teammates
It is a rare individual who decides, “I want to be the best in the world and I’ll do whatever it takes to reach that goal.” You are lucky to find anyone that shares that passion and drive. It’s a gift to find someone as obsessed with the same goal as yours, who is also a close friend that you care deeply for.
You are likely to create great friends by being on a team together. But you’ll be lucky if you can find great friends with whom you should be on a team.
An equal level of commitment toward a common goal is what ties teammates together and builds unlikely friendships. Sharply different levels of commitment between teammates can destroy friendships just as easily.
Though preferable, being close friends is not a prerequisite for being good teammates. An amazing thing happens when you have a group of people who share a passion for a particular goal and need each other to achieve it. Being equally committed to that goal, and working together in pursuit of it despite your differences, will often create new friends, “friends” in the deepest sense of the word. You can’t help but develop a great appreciation for someone whom you share a dream with, whom you rely on to help make that dream come true, and who comes through for you.
Personal Goals vs. Team Goals: Selfless or Selfish?
Most of us who decide to pursue excellence in any field do so initially from a purely selfish motivation. I want to win. I want to be a winner. I want to be a world champion. It is all about our own personal goals and rewards. But if our selfish desire toward personal success requires a team, a profound evolution can often take place.
For me to achieve my personal goal, I need a team.
For me to achieve my goals, the team has to achieve its goals.
For the team to achieve its goals, my teammates must achieve their personal goals.
So, for me to become the winner that I want to be, it is also required of me to become the teammate my teammates need me to be. Though originally spawned from selfish motivation, I am now forced to learn to be supportive, compassionate, honest, and understanding. If I don’t develop these attributes, my teammates will fail, my team will fail, and I will fail.
In the process of providing the emotional support and encouragement my teammates need, I witness positive results in each of them and the team’s performance as a whole. They are all feeling much better about themselves and their confidence is growing. The team is achieving better results and having more fun in the process.
Suddenly I realize that it makes me feel great to be able to provide the support that strengthens my teammates and the team. Not only is it personally fulfilling, but the team needs this from me if we are to win. There is immense personal gratification in being a teammate who can make this kind of difference for my teammates and the team. I feel wonderful about myself that I am able to help my teammates to be stronger, more confident, and better competitors—the teammates I need them to be.
This support goes both ways. Unbeknownst to me, of course, being the full-of-myself, overconfident person I am, I have needed and received the same support from my teammates, and they have been just as fulfilled providing it to me. This experience can change someone from being a selfish punk to a reliable, supportive human being that truly cares about the people around him.
Selfish, or selfless? Both. On a true high-performance team, the individual goals of the teammates are so directly tied to the success of the team that you cannot separate the two. What is best for the teammates is best for the team, is best for you.
The pursuit of victory, of becoming a winner, always provides the opportunity to become a better human being. Don’t miss out on it.
Motivation
It is very powerful for all the members of a team to share the same reason and motivation for being on the team, but even that, though far preferable, is not absolutely essential.
One teammate might be in it for the pure love of the game. Another one primarily for the praise they will receive once they have become a “winner.” To be honest, for most people it is a combination of both. It is possible for a team to succeed even if the teammates have completely different reasons as to why they want to achieve the goal. But for the team they are building together now, at this time, they need to agree on the same team goal and be fully committed to the goal they’ve set.
As long as their reasons and personal goals are not in direct opposition to each other, then it is possible for them to be achieved together. It is imperative, however, that each teammate needs for the team to achieve its goal in order for them to achieve theirs. The personal goals have to be a result of, and dependent upon, the team’s goals.
Joining an Existing Team
It is great to be in a position where you are able to choose the people you want on your team. Most of us do that with our partners in life. There are other situations where you join preexisting teams and usually have little or no say of who your teammates are. This could be the case in many jobs and positions you may be hired into, or even families you marry into.
Most often in these situations, your teammates have the potential to do a good job and make a positive contribution to the team. They were probably hired based on that alone. But whether they have a passion for the activity or a deep desire to “win” and achieve the team’s goals is more often in question.
It is not uncommon to find teammates who approach work the same way that I had first approached college, asking themselves, “What is the least I can do that will still be enough to get by?” Or for the more motivated ones, asking themselves the same question I originally had when beginning to compete in 4-way: “What is the least we can do that may position us to where there is some chance that it is possible to win?”
Neither of these questions opens the door for particularly inspiring answers. These are questions asked by people who have accepted mediocrity as their goal and don’t expect or think their team is capable of any more than that.
Most of the time, if you ask them, they will tell you that they are personally capable of more but that they can only be as good as their team is, and others in the team, or the structure of the team, are holding them back. It’s a good excuse, but not necessarily true. Your job may not be something you are as passionate about as I am at skydiving. But as I discovered in my last year of college, having something you are driven to excel at is an incredibly rewarding experience, regardless of how much you love the activity itself.
Most people would want to operate at work like a highperformance team but think this is something reserved only for the best sports teams. They don’t believe it’s possible to achieve this because they have never been a part of one. They can’t even imagine that their work team could be a high-performance team, and no one is stepping up to prove it otherwise. Be that person to step up.
High-performance teams aren’t created overnight. It takes time and commitment. You need to prove to yourselves and each other that working together in this way is far more personally rewarding than intentionally accepting and aiming for mediocrity. Start planting the seeds of success right from the beginning.
Be the person to recognize and point out the team’s common goals and what it means for your team to “win.”
Define your own personal goals. Pinpoint the specific areas in which you need to improve and what you want to accomplish that will help the team to reach its goals.
Ask people for help if you need it and give your teammates the chance to experience, through helping you, how great it feels to contribute to the team’s effort.
Find one teammate and work together to achieve a goal you share. There is certain to be something; find it. Without at first becoming completely dependent upon them, let them feel what it feels like to be trusted, to have teammates counting on you, to be working together toward a common goal.
You may not have picked the team, but that doesn’t mean you can’t mold it into the ideal team you want it to be.
Mediocrity is something people accept, not something they aspire to. As individuals realize they don’t have to accept it, they will aspire to do more and to be more. The team you are trying to build is the team most people will want to be a part of. Your motivation will become contagious.
Lead by example and don’t let those who are determined to perform poorly drag you and the team down. Don’t waste your time trying to force your inspiration on everyone else. But be inspired nonetheless.
Make one good decision at a time. Stick to what you know is right, and continue to operate as the teammate that you would want to have. Little by little, you will start to build momentum. At some point you will pull your team across the threshold of becoming a high-performance team. There will be no turning back.
Trust
Mutual trust is an essential element of all great teams. Specifically, you must be able to unconditionally trust that the actions and words of your teammates are motivated by what they think is best for the team.
You may disagree with and not even understand certain behaviors, attitudes, and decisions. But if this level of trust is built into the foundation of your team, you will always know that at the core of each teammate’s conduct is what they feel is in the team’s best interest. And that’s all you need to know. This deep-rooted trust is what holds teams together during hard times or when dealing with difficult relationships and heated debates.
Trusting our teammates, and being trusted by them, is incredibly motivating, even inspiring. We all know the value we give to people we truly trust. We are well aware of what it feels like to count on people and to be counted on by them. Once given that trust, we will always want to demonstrate that we are worthy of it in everything we do. It encourages us to communicate freely and openly and to do all we can to become the teammate that the team needs us to be.
A mood of distrust has the exact opposite effect. We are suspicious, even paranoid, of our teammates’ intent, and they look upon us in the same light. The most honorable conduct is seen as being motivated for the wrong reasons. In a team environment like this, we end up walking on eggshells because we fear what the others may think if we say or do the wrong thing.
Trust is an essential quality of high-performance teams in every field. But trust is not something that we tend to just give away. Think of the people in your life who have your complete, undying trust. These are usually family members or very close friends. People who have earned your trust by proving they deserved it many times over years of shared experiences.
It’s hard to trust. It costs time and risks disappointment. We all know the pain of having someone that we truly believed in break that trust.
Therein lies the problem when forming a new team or joining an existing one. If it is true that (1) the definition of a great team includes a deep sense of mutual trust, and (2) trust is something that takes a long time and shared experiences to earn, then it is impossible to assemble a new, great team. The team can’t be great without trusting each other. And they can’t truly trust each other until they have shared many experiences together and proven they deserve that trust. This could take a very long time, longer than the time the team has before needing to reach its objective.
If you want your new team to be a great team, you will need to get past this problem.
The only way to do this is by giving that trust to your teammates without first requiring that they earn it.
The first response most people have to this idea is that they would never do that. You may prepay for goods and services, but not trust. A teammate is someone you are counting on, someone you need, someone you can’t achieve your goals without. You would never just hand over your dreams to someone who hadn’t proven they deserved that trust.
But that’s not true. The deepest, most intense trust that one human being can ever give to another is given without having previously been earned. I’m referring to the trust between a newborn baby and its parents.
Moments after our first child Chloe was born, it hit me: “Wow. I’m someone’s dad.”
Kristi and I had the good fortune to have come from warm, loving families and had been a part of some great teams. But never before had we experienced anything that compared to this level of unconditional trust.
Chloe needed us. She counted on us for everything: warmth, shelter, love, food, affection, protection, and knowledge. She needed us to hold her when she cried and comfort her when she was scared. No one else cared as much as we did that she accomplished the goal of growing up in a healthy and loving environment. Her goal was our goal. We were teammates.
A baby has no reason not to trust the people who brought her into the world. Why would we have “assembled that team” if we weren’t worthy of that trust? She hadn’t yet learned it could be otherwise.
We had never proven to our children prior to having them that we were worthy of the level of trust they gave us. They gave that trust first. After being given that trust, we then felt obligated, inspired, and committed to live up to it. The trust was given before it was earned.
The responsibility of having been given this kind of trust was intense. We decided right then that we would never let her down. We considered how every decision, action, and choice of words would affect her, always striving to be the best examples we could be. We thought about how we treated other people, ourselves, and each other. We consciously made sure that we were demonstrating the qualities we wanted her to learn.
The trust that is asked and required of parents is far greater than anything that could possibly be asked of a teammate in sports, the arts, business, or any other field.
If we want our new team to be a great team, we must also be willing to give our teammates that same trust. Why would we have assembled or joined this team if we didn’t think they were going to be worthy of it? Expect that they are, and trust them to be.
Ultimately, we will all have to prove that we are deserving of each other’s trust every day through our choices and actions. If a teammate is not deserving of this trust, it will usually be revealed very quickly. But by giving this trust first, we enable our new team to become a great team in the shortest time possible.
