Are you still leaving your card behind the bar?
With 1 gazillion GDPR emails to get through, I completely understand you might not have realised it’s the Champions League final tomorrow.
Several of the pre-match interviews will be about team spirit & playing as a unit. Likewise, when Man City were crowned as Premiership champions, players & coaches talked at length about the team spirit as the key driver towards their dominant success. Most of the top Premiership clubs field teams with similar(ish) values for every game, so why has Man City been such a cut above the rest, and not my beloved Spurs? (Help us Mo Po, you’re our only hope…..)
How do you create team spirit? How do you enable your own work colleagues to strive for the same goal, and have each others back at the same time?
Too often, business leaders allow their teams to be like rats in a barrel. All trying to eat one another before they get eaten themselves.

Survival skills are important, but you can’t stick your card behind the bar, and expect everything to be rosy for the next 6 months. That might well work for 10% of your team, but what about the others? When was the last time you sat down with them, and tried to TRULY understand what motivates them?
We all look uniquely different, so why would you think our brains are wired the same?
Yet, in 2018, so many business leaders still assume we are wired the same, or even worse, try to re-wire or clone everyone to conform to the same method of working.
As an industry, I’m glad to say we are pretty open minded to psychometric tests. Nearly everyone I have ever had the pleasure of working with has completed one. (Think Myers Briggs, Introvert, Extrovert etc…)
Once you understand your own character traits, it’s so much easier to understand others. This leads to minimising conflict, improving communications, and hey presto, guess what? The team is beginning to work better together. Don’t stop at reading the reports though!!!
You have to perservere.
We are (generally) terrible at following it up with any actionables. We might do it for a week or two, and then we fall back into old habits. Why? Because we don’t have a headmaster to report to and keep us on track. Who is your headmaster?
Unlike this blog, there is no end point to developing & motivating. It’s a continual cycle, but you have to make the first step to make a difference.
If you’re still reading this, then I would say we’re on the same wavelength, and you are another step ahead of your competitors. They probably stopped reading after the first paragraph, went to the pub, and stuck their card behind the bar assuming that’s all they need to do for the next few 6 months.