Brainpark

Our willingness to tolerate things in work which we would never tolerate outside work never ceases to amaze me. There are lots of justifications for our unwillingness to question the way we do things here.  It is certainly stressful to challenge well-established but ultimately wasteful professional practices as nobody likes going out on a limb to point out the elephants in the rooms that our colleagues no longer see.

One place where I believe we tolerate a huge amount of waste is the way we lead and participate in work teams. My bookshelf abounds with titles such as “Why Teams don’t Work” and theories such as the Superteam (consisting of only one person). If you ask people if they are currently part of a “High Performing Team” most people, if they are being honest, will say “No” or “I am not sure”. This is the root of the problem.

My thesis is that all of us have at some points in our lives been part of at least one high-performing team – it may just not have been in our working lives. I argue that the characteristics of high-performing teams can show up very strongly in a number of non-work areas including:

• Being part of a sports team
• Being in a music band or orchestra or choir
• Being on an adventure holiday (including skiing and snow-boarding)
• Being on holiday with your family in an unfamiliar city
• Being part of a pressure group or political campaign

So my provocation is this – most of us already know how to do high-performing teams so why don’t we bring these sensibilities to with us to work?

That’s my challenge to you – democratize your workteams and make them more effective and less frustrating by using your “team experiences” from outside work!

To find out more you can watch my TEDx video or you can download a free copy of  The Bioteaming Manifesto (34 pages)

Ken Thompson is an Author, Consultant, Speaker, Technologist and Entrepreneur on High Performing Teams and Collaborative Enterprise and can be contacted on LinkedIN at http://www.linkedin.com/in/bioteams