If you know me you no how soppy I can be, and I will often talk about love in a work setting. If you don’t know me you are probably wandering what the hell I am going on about. Am I encouraging workplace romances? No I am not, that is another blog entirely.
Before I start, lets make a distinction between romantic love and relational love. Now this is my view of love you may have a slightly different view, I but I am certain most of us would agree with the distinction between the two. It is quite obvious really, the difference between the two is sex. Love is a an essential emotional to maintain the existence of our species. It is all about creating strong bonds between people to either create more people or keep people safe. Simply put that is it, it clearly has more nuances than that but it is essentially there to support the survival of the species. Even romantic love once the initial lust and passion normalises requires relational love to sustain our relationship.
Relational love requires you to have a strong regard for the welfare of the other person. You want them to succeed and flourish. And this is the key the desire for the other person to succeed, as their success feels like a success for you. We feel this for close family members (our loved ones) we can also feel this for people that work in our team. We want each other to succeed, we route for each other, we combine our successes to create a collective success. So when we fall we are there for each other, to pick each other up, dust ourselves down and carry on. Love in a team allows us to pull each other up and hold each other to account when we fall short. Difficult conversations become essential conversations we find it easier to maintain standards and always look to improve what we do.
A loving team culture is not a cosey team culture, far from it. A loving team culture, requires trust, a comfort in discourse, a shared vision, a willingness to be accountable for your actions, and to be focussed on outcomes. Many of you will recognise those conditions from Patrick Lencioni’s 5 Dysfunctions of a Team, with the absence of these creates a dysfunctional team. If you have them in abundance you have a highly effective team that pulls together. A loving team is diverse and inclusive, where everyone belongs and everyone contributes to the teams success, regardless of their role and background. A loving team is not just inwardly focused however, a loving team embraces interdependence, and is open to giving and receiving support from other teams and stakeholders.
Creating and maintaining a loving team takes work, it does not come easy. It starts with building and maintaining trust. We trust people more when we know them about them, allowing time in the working week for social interaction is vital to create a loving team. Brene Brown (you know I had to mention her) has developed a great acronym to help to build and maintain trust, based on her own research on trust. You may have seen it before but here it is again for those of you unfamiliar, the acronym is BRAVING
- Boundaries: Make sure you are clear what your boundaries are and make people aware of what you will and wont accept and what the consequences are if your boundaries are crossed.
- Reliability: Do what you say you are going to do, when you say you are going to do it. Turn up when you say you will, every time.
- Accountability: We are human so we do fall short from time to time. When you do acknowledge it, apologise and make amends. Accept the accountability of others
- Vault: Keep peoples confidences, avoid gossiping about people in and out of your team.
- Integrity: Do the right thing, even when it is easier not to, or when no one is looking.
- Non-Judgement: Offer your help and support to people without judgement. Ask for help from others without judging yourself
- Generosity: Be generous in spirit, accept that everyone is doing their best with what they have in front of them. Even if their best is not good enough, ask yourself how can I help them make it better
Applying this personally and within a team will help your team build trust with each other. When we trust each other we feel comfortable disagreeing with each other, without taking it personally, which allows us to come to the right conclusion.
It is important once you have trust in you team that you are all clear what your shared vision is. It is vital to be clear what direction you are all going in and what it is that you want to achieve. Make time every week to discuss what your vision is to ensure that you are not drifting as a team and you are connecting with each other. If you have a big team that work in shifts (like clinical teams) encourage regular conversations, make briefing and debriefing commonplace to encourage discussions about what you want to achieve and how things are going. Make sure your team can articulate what your team goals are, so everyone is working towards achieving it.
Having a loving team is showing care and attention to each other, but as it is in a loving family it is far more than that. It takes commitment, hard work and time but pays dividends in the end. Don’t be afraid of creating a loving team, embrace it and keep working at it.
Connected Coaching 