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Elegance

BlogCultureCulture Series

Culture – Involvement: Empowerment

by Ron Potter October 24, 2019

Organizations with highly empowered employees have a couple of things in common:

Processes Pushed Downward

The first common point is that processes are pushed down the hierarchy to the lowest possible level.  When I say processes, the survey measures explicitly Information, planning, and decisions.

This point starts with the genuine belief that the information needed for good planning and decision making resides with the people closest to the action.  I used the words “genuine belief” because I’ve seen too many leaders and leadership teams proclaim that the needed information resides and is better understood at levels below them but their ego and position keep them from letting go of their own beliefs and assumptions.  They also believe they are the leaders of the organization because they are smarter and know better what to do then those who have not yet reached their level in the company.  If you’re a member of a high-level team, be very, very careful that you don’t let that ego prevent you from hearing and understanding the information from the people who are closer to the action.

During my blog series on being a Leader, I talked about the Sweet Rewards of Humility.  You can follow the link below if you have more interest.

My point is, you must be a humble leader in order to empower your people and organization.

Positive Impact and Involved

The second thing that organizations with highly empowered people have in common: Employees believe they can have a positive impact and are therefore highly involved in their individual work and the work of their team.  They are good at integrating their work with that of their team.

Integrating Work with Others

The key to positive impact and involvement? Integrating with others.  It takes good teamwork.  We’ll look at the elements of a Team Orientation in a future blog.  But for now, let’s remind ourselves of the aspects of building a good team:

  • Truth: Being able to speak the reality of a situation.  This ability must reside both in peer-to-peer relationships as well as a top-down, bottom-up relationship.
  • Respect:  We must respect the opinions and observations of everyone.  When people feel respected, they are willing to share and integrate their work with others.
  • Elegance: Good integration of work means reducing the friction caused naturally between different parts of an organization.
  • Commitment:  Integration means that sometimes, other parts of the organization must benefit.  It is possible to improve each part of the organization but not to maximize each part of the organization.  A good team requires a commitment to the best for the overall company, not just a particular part of the organization.
Empowerment is required for good involvement.
Good involvement is a requirement of a great culture.

 

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BlogLeadershipTeam

Team and Leadership: Summary

by Ron Potter July 15, 2019

Over the last several weeks we have been reviewing and expanding on the elements of a great team in our Thursday blog.  At the same time, our Monday blog has been exploring more detail on the elements of great leadership.  These are the first two legs of our Team Leadership Culture (TLC) model.

In general I believe it’s important to build a great team before working on leadership skills but in reality, it’s difficult to accomplish one without the other.  In many cases, they are tightly coupled and interdependent.

Today let’s review the elements of team and leadership and see how they fit together.

Elements of Team

Truth – Respect – Elegance – Commitment

Elements of Leadership

Humility – Development – Commitment – Focus
Compassion – Integrity – Peacemaking – Endurance

Interdependence

Let’s start with the elements of Team and look at the interdependence, overlap, and alignment with the Leadership elements.

Truth => Humility – Integrity – Peacemaking

To build a great team, members must be truthful with each other.  Truthfulness requires Humility, Integrity, and Peacemaking from the Leadership Skill List.

Humility

Humility has been misunderstood and misused in recent years.  Often people think of “turning the other cheek” or even being a “doormat” in order to be humble.  The original meaning of the word meant great power under complete control.  Humility doesn’t mean you’re powerless.  In fact quite the opposite.  It means that you have tremendous power.  Enough power to crush your opposition.  But when you’re humble, you choose not to use that power in a destructive way but to use the power for intense learning and curiosity.  Humble people may be the most powerful people in the room but are focused on individual and team learning through curiosity.  Humble people assume the other person may know something they don’t or have a very different perspective that’s worth learning.

Integrity

Integer also comes from the same root as integer.  It means whole, complete, sound and even incorruptible.  A person of high integrity is the same, complete, whole person no matter where they are or who they are with.  You can always trust they are and will be the same and say the same thing no matter what.  This is essential for the Truth required on teams as well as Commitment.  If you can’t trust that someone is genuine and has integrity, it’s difficult to get at the truth or sustain commitment.

Peacemaking

Peacemaking is also a word that we’ll see associated with Truth and Commitment.  Peacemaking is not the absence of conflict and different opinions.  Peacemaking understands that differences of opinion is natural for human-beings but has figured out a way to work through the differences and conflicts in a healthy productive way.

Respect => Humility, Development, Compassion and Integrity

Building and maintain respect with a team requires a leadership style built on humility, development, compassion, and integrity.

It’s important to note here that when I use the word leadership, I don’t mean the identified leader of the team.  I have observed people of all ranks and positions being leaders.  True leadership comes from your actions, not your position.

Humility and Integrity

We talked about humility and integrity in the Truth section above.  The same issues apply to Respect.

Development

From my book “Trust Me” development is described as “Leaders who accept the truth and train others to seize the benefits of adversity, loss, and change.  Growing people and giving them opportunities is one of the best ways to show respect.

Compassion

There have been a few clients through the years that didn’t believe compassion had anything to do with business.  In their minds, business was logical and should be dispassionate.

I’ve often used an old adage to counter that thinking:  “I don’t care how much you know until I know how much you care!”

When people feel like you care for them as a human being first, they feel trusted and respected.

Elegance => Commitment, Focus, Peacemaking

Commitment and Focus

I’ve combined these two but they do go together in many ways.  It requires a firm and aligned grip on the goal and purpose of the team to accomplish the required tasks in the simplest way with the least amount of friction.  Make the goals and purpose clear and then make sure everyone is committed.  This will eliminate much of the territorial behavior that happens with teams.

Focus is under attack more than any point in history.  All of our modern devices are determined to capture our focus thereby scattering our attention.  Our own egos also drive us to accomplish more things and be in more places than necessary or even possible.  Staying focused on the goal and purpose is the only way to keep things Elegant.

Peacemaking

Peacemaking was discussed above.  In making sure that things are accomplished in the simplest way possible, it will take a great deal of peacemaking to settle territorial disputes.

Commitment => Commitment, Peacemaking, Endurance

Commitment and Peacemaking

These two were also discussed above.  In terms of Team Commitment, it will take a strong commitment to the goal and purpose of the team.  It will also take a great Peacemaking/Decision-Making process.  Our earlier blog on Team Commitment talks about the process that provides a win-win environment which is essential to reach full commitment.

Endurance

I used the TREC (Truth, Respect, Elegance, Commitment) acronym because it looks and sounds like the word TREK.  A TREK is described as a long arduous journey.  Especially one involving difficulties and complex organization.  Building a great team is a long arduous journey.  It takes great leadership to deal with the difficulties and complex organizations.

Team and Leadership

That’s the summary of the first two elements of TLC, Team Leadership Culture.

  1. Build a great team
  2. Development great leadership skills
  3. Create the culture to achieve the goals and purpose

The Rest of the Year Adventure

Over the next several months we will be talking about Culture, the third leg of TLC.  We’ll be doing this in our Thursday morning blog posts.  Our Monday blogs have been dedicated to the Leadership aspect of TLC.  For the rest of this year, we’ll be using Monday’s to blog about things that provoke some thought.  These usually come from my daily experiences in life, what I observe in the world, an article or book that makes a point that I think should be shared.  They won’t happen like clockwork every Monday morning but simply when something strikes me as worthwhile.  Stay tuned.

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BlogTeamTeam Series

Team Elements: Summary

by Ron Potter July 4, 2019

We’ve just finished our series on building great teams.  Years ago I named my consulting company Team Leadership Culture, TLC for short.  Over 30 years of consulting work plus another 20 years in the engineering/construction industry and software development I experienced this combination to be the winning formula for great success.

Team

Build a great team first.  While great leaders certainly increase the opportunity for success, if they don’t work together as a team, the final result is always a failure.  Build the dynamics of a great team first.

Leadership

If you’ve built a great team, increasing leadership skills will greatly enhance your opportunity for success.  If your goal is to do something really great or overcome great difficulties, add powerful leadership skills to great team dynamics.  Next week we’re going to look at these two elements in combination and you’ll also see great overlap that makes it difficult to accomplish one without the other.

Culture

There is plenty of research that companies and teams with great cultures rock!  Starting in a couple of weeks we’re going to look at the elements of great culture.  But, it’s important to note that it’s impossible to build a great culture without great teams and great leadership.

Great Teams

So let’s recap the elements of great teams.  I use Aristotle’s “Pursuit of Happiness” as the model of great teams.  Aristotle describes four levels of happiness.  Level 4 is the highest of the four pursuits and the one that Aristotle says all humanity seeks.  He describes it with five words: Truth, Love, Purpose, Beauty, and Unity.  I have not concentrated on Purpose because I believe business teams usually know their purpose.  However, if the purpose of the team is in question, that must be corrected first or all else fails.

I’ve also translated the four remaining words into terms that are better understood in a business environment and also make them easier to remember.

Truth (Trust)

Great teams know how to speak the truth with each other and also view their environment in a very truthful way.  We have numerous stories of corporate failures when the leader or the team just doesn’t believe the external environment is going to change enough to affect them.

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”  Tom Watson Sr., IBM, 1943.

“Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.”  Henry Ford

On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors: John Z. DeLorean’s Look Inside the Automotive Giant

Speak the truth about your industry and customers.
Speak the truth with each other.  Great teams are built on great people who have entirely different perspectives.  Figure out how to share those different perspectives with each other and speak the truth.

Respect (Love)

This combination of Trust and Respect has been observed and chronicled throughout history.  Modern research reveals that psychological safety is essential for great team performance.  Psychological Safety is bringing Truth and Respect to the team.

Elegance (Beauty)

Elegance or beauty is all about simplicity and clarity.  Most leaders and teams think of organization structure when they think of elegance.  Do they have the best structure that invokes simplicity and clarity to get the job done?

Many of the leaders I’ve worked with through the years have asked me which organizational structure is the best.  They are never really satisfied with my answer because I tell them it doesn’t make any difference.  Organizational structures are simply lines on a chart to help direct large numbers of people to accomplish great things.  But all organizational structures are artificial.  They’re just a means to organize work and people.  Every company I’ve ever worked for is in the process of shifting from one org. structure to another.  No structure is perfect and no structure last forever.

Work on simplicity and clarity regardless of the structure.

Commitment (Unity)

Getting to unity is the ultimate goal of any team.  Commitment is the outward expression of team unity.  I’ve selected the word commitment because of this outward expression and because it brings all the elements together as TREC.  Hopefully thinking of TREC reminds you of the real word TREK which is defined as a long arduous journey.  Using TREC to build a team is a long arduous journey but it’s well worth the effort.

Always the Engineer

I graduated from the University of Michigan with an engineering degree.  I guess I still think like an engineer regardless of the task: Great structures, great software, great teams.  So here is my engineering formula for building great teams with TREC:

[ (T x R) + E ] x C = Effective Teams

Truth times Respect, plus Elegance, all times Commitment equals Effective Teams.

Let’s take a snap quiz.  Pick a team you’re a member of and score each element of TREC on a zero to five basis.   What’s the maximum score for the equation?  [ (5 x 5) + 5] x 5 = 150

Least Impactful Element

Which element has the least impact on the overall score?  Elegance!  Let’s say you score a 5 on all elements except Elegance which is a zero.  Your total score would be 130.  Increasing  Elegance from zero to five increases the overall score from 125 to 150.  And yet, when things aren’t going well, one of the first things I see leaders do is change the org. structure.

Most Impactful Element

Which element has the most impact?  Commitment!  You can score the maximum on Truth, Respect, and Elegance but if your Commitment score is zero, your overall score is ZERO!  Just increasing it from zero to three improves your effectiveness score from zero to 90!  Build Commitment!

Team Effectiveness

It’s hard to improve any one element at a time.  There is no way you will build commitment without truth and respect.  Respect will never be realized without speaking the truth and committing to the team.  Building teams is a TREC, a long arduous journey.  But when I talk with those of us who have grown gray over many years, our best memories are the great teams we worked with and what we accomplished together.

Take the journey.  It’s worth it!

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BlogTeamTeam Series

Team Elements – Elegance: Summary

by Ron Potter May 23, 2019

We’ve looked at three of the four sections that will help us build great teams: Truth, Respect, and now Elegance.  This week’s blog is a summary of the Elegance portion that has been written about over the last three weeks.

Elegance is made up of Simplicity, Focus, and Role Clarification.

Simplicity

Simplicity:  We all know the old adage KISS, Keep It Simple, Stupid.  I love old adages because they’re built on truth, even if they are a little rude like this one.  But the point is right on target.  Keep It Simple!  Once we start adding complexity to an issue, it becomes less elegant, more prone to mistakes, missteps, miss understandings, and missed results.  Our human brain is lazy and overloaded.  It looks for ways to simplify things so we have the capacity to understand and deal with complexity.  The more we simplify the greater chance the team has to perform together.

Focus

Books have been written about how our modern technology is not only destroying our focus but is destroying our ability to focus.  That’s scary to me.  But, like any muscle or ability, we can enhance that ability through dedication and practice.  You’re not going to be in good physical shape without regular exercise.  You’re not going to be a good reader without reading on a regular and disciplined base.  You’re not going to be focused without regular exercising of focus.

In every case, the concept is simple but the execution is difficult.

  • Go out for that walk, run, or bicycle ride on a regular basis.  Get to the gym several days per week.  Seems simple enough.  But it takes dedication and determination
  • Pick up that book rather than turn on the TV or flip through social media or complete just two more games on your phone.  Seems simple enough.  But, there we are, watching TV, finally looking up from our social media not realizing that we just spent an hour.  Time is more valuable than money.  We can always earn more money.  But, once you spend that hour, ten minutes or even ten seconds on something frivolous, it’s gone forever.  You’ll never get it back.  Focus.

Role Clarification

This one is a negative, not a positive.  While simplicity and focus are things that will greatly enhance teams, demanding that everyone stay in their “swim lane” or just do their role well and don’t worry about everyone else is a negative when it comes to great teams.  Yes, good teams rely on everyone knowing and doing their roles well but great teams tend to blend and mix thinking and perspectives in order to come up with the best solution.  Great teams function more like orchestras where the parts blend well together and are much richer and stronger in harmony they are as individuals.

Elegance

Elegance is the third leg of our team journey.  It’s an important and positive leg but is more subtle than the previous two.  When we’re not sharing the truth or showing respect, it’s obvious.  When our Elegance is slipping it is not always to see it happening right away.  Stay diligent on this one.  Look for the signs of Elegance waning.  Build an Elegant team.  It’s powerful!

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BlogTeamTeam Series

Team Elements – Elegance: Role Clarification

by Ron Potter May 16, 2019

This will be our last blog post on the Elegance section of TREC: Truth, Respect, Elegance, and Commitment.  We’ll summarize these three elements in our next blog as you begin to see the entire journey to great team development.

This post, a subtopic of Elegance, is about Role Clarification but I want to start with one of those statements that seem to have gone viral in corporate speak.

Stay in your Swim Lane

If you’ve been in the corporate world over the last several years, you’ve probably heard this term.  I’m not sure who started this cliche but it sure wasn’t someone who knew how to build great teams.  This is NOT one of my favorite sayings.  Every time I hear this statement it’s in reference to someone who has:

  • crossed the boundary
  • stepped on someone else’s toes
  • “presumed” to know better than the “expert” how things should or should not be done

Whatever the reason for the irritation, it sends a message that everyone is supposed to do their own job and somehow that will make the team effort successful.  This message reveals a couple of beliefs at the core of team building.

  1. Build the right set of skills, do your job and everything will be just fine.
  2. No one has the skills or experience to question the “expert.”  Questioning the expert questions their competency.

There are some fallacies in those beliefs.

  • Skills and competencies are what will make a team and a corporation successful.  WRONG!
    The reason this belief exists is that most corporations depend on the measurement of skills and competencies as the measure of internal success.  Promotions, pay levels, and other rewards are based on these measurements.  Research and experience points to the fact the good people skills create more success than job skills and competencies.  It’s just that people skills, leadership style, and team engagement are harder to measure.
  • Other research shows that new creative, innovative, breakthrough ideas almost always come not from the expert but from the person who has a different perspective altogether.

Orchestras and Choirs

Teams should function more like an orchestra.  If you want a quick read about what that looks like, try Maestro: A Surprising Story about leading by listening by Roger Nierenberg.

I’ve been a choir member off and on for years.  I just love the harmonizing of the various parts.  When it all comes together in a crescendo, it just sends a chill down your spine and sometimes brings tears to your eyes.  Hearing and being a part of a 12, 50 or 100 member choir as they bring their voices together is a wonderful experience.

Rehearsals

Rehearsals are very different and a great learning experience.

  • The leader expects each section to know their part and perform it well
  • The leader will often stop us to say, “This section is not working, let’s listen to each part then put it all back together again.”
  • Often we’re instructed to tone our section down a bit so that the overall piece can be better understood.  “Basses, tone it down.  The sopranos are carrying the melody at this point and you’re drowning them out.  The audience can’t hear the melody.”
  • “Now basses, pick up the energy and the lead from the sopranos and bring it together with the same enthusiasm.”

The orchestra conductor leads us.  He expects us to know our part and corrects us when we don’t do it well.  But when we do it together it sounds awesome!

Business teams don’t usually function in this manner.  “Stay in your swim lanes” or “Know your job assignment and do it well.”  Seldom do I hear team leaders asking a section to tone it down, work at something other than your optimum rate, blend with the team, pick up on their enthusiasm and build something great together!

Build Team

Knowing our roles is important.  Building a great team means bringing it all together, not just maximizing each part!

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Elegance: Focus
BlogTeamTeam Series

Team Elements – Elegance: Focus

by Ron Potter May 9, 2019

We’re working through the Elegance section of a TREC.  TREC stands for Truth, Respect, Elegance, and Commitment.  These are the four elements that make up great teams.

Elegance consists of Simplicity (our last blog post) Focus and Role Clarification.  This blog post will explore Focus.

Focus

Lack of Focus is another issue that keeps teams from becoming Elegant in their approach.

I’m a baby boomer.   The Beatles didn’t come on the scene until I was in my teens.  I started a microcomputer software company when Microsoft was still in Albuquerque, NM before moving it to Seattle.  I owned one of the first Blackberry’s on the market.

I’m not sharing all of this just to demonstrate that I’m old, I’m setting the stage by saying that I’ve seen a lot of changes in my life and career.  But what I have not seen through those many years of changes is a population so distracted as I see today.  I watched a person walk straight into a lamp pole while being distracted on their phone.  When I’m on the highway I can immediately notice a driver several cars ahead of me when they turn their attention to their phone rather than the road and traffic.  We are losing our focus people.  Even scarier, we’re losing our ability to focus.

One of the more profound books I’ve read over the last several years is Deep Work, Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport.  Cal gives us research, reason, and ideas on how to regain some of this lost focus.  It’s well worth the read.

Over my 30 years of consulting work, the people who I would put in the category of best leaders all had an ability to focus.  In fact, one common trait that began to emerge over the years was their experience and belief that they could only hold the proper focus if they kept their list of key issues to three or less.  Their time frames might change, usually from quarterly to yearly but the numbers was always three.  If they begin to feel distracted from those three, even if it was for very good and legitimate reasons, they would start to hand-off the responsibility to others so they could get back to their three priorities.  This was also a good way to grow others in the process.

Have you begun to look at what distracts you from your primary three goals?  Our technology is geared to distract us or at least to attract our attention at a moments notice.

  • Have you turned off the notifications on your phone?
  • Have you set aside a period of time each day for no email or texts?
  • Even more powerful, have you established an hour a day, a day per week, a few days per month when you eliminate all of the distractions to get into some deep work?

Just like Einstein’s quote on simplicity, it takes courage.  But without the courage you’ll never grow, progress, reach your goals, stay focused, become an elegant performer.  Another definition of elegance is:

Pleasingly graceful in appearance or manner.”

Are you and your team pleasingly graceful in your manner?  Maybe you need to work on your simplicity and focus!

Stress

One final thought on focus before we leave.  If you’ve fallen into the trap of being constantly distracted by your technology or connected 24/7, you will be experiencing stress in your life that is unnecessary!  If you’re experiencing constant stress that you don’t seem to be able to escape, read Cal Newport‘s book, Deep Work. Just the act of focusing on a book for a while will help relieve some of the stress and you’ll find good lessons for returning to a more satisfying and less stressful approach to live and work.  Focus!

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BlogTeamTeam Series

Team Elements – Elegance: Simplicity

by Ron Potter May 2, 2019

Let’s continue our TREC to a great team.

You’ll recall that Aristotle defined four levels of the Pursuit of Happiness.  Level 4 is the highest level that produces the most happiness.  Aristotle’s words to describe this level were Truth, Love, Beauty, and Unity.  I’ve converted those words into Truth, Respect, Elegance, and Commitment.  I’ve made this conversion for a couple of reasons.

  1. Words like Love and Beauty are not often found in our corporate language today so I’ve converted Love to Respect and Beauty to Elegance
  2. I like to use language tricks to help you remember a concept.  TREC sounds very much like the word TREK.  The word TREK means a “long, arduous journey.”  Building a great team is a long, arduous journey.  You’re on a TREK

If you intend to start that journey of building a great team, following the concepts of TREC will help you accomplish that goal.

We’ve looked at Truth and Respect in our previous blog posts.   Our next topic is Elegance which will include the subtopics of

  • Simplicity
  • Focus
  • Role Clarification

Today we’ll start looking at Simplicity.

Simplicity

One definition of the word Elegance says “the quality of being pleasingly ingenious and simple.”

I think every team would want to be known as ingenious.  Our corporations are pushing for more innovation every day.  But I think simplicity is the more powerful and difficult of the two.  In fact, being ingenious in the simplest form is the most powerful type of innovation.

Albert Einstein said,

The definition of genius is taking the complex and making it simple.”  He also said “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.”

Notice that with the pause right in the middle, he indicated that it would take courage.  Taking something complex and making it simple is genius at work but it takes courage.  Why?

I think one of the answers to that question is that you are a professional or expert.  Often you have earned your right to be on the team because you have become a professional or an expert at something.  Professionals and experts tend to make things more complex to prove themselves or show-off their genius.  But, back to Einstein’s quote, any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex.  Real genius happens when things are simplified, made more elegant, streamlined, easier to adjust to changes, quicker to adopt.

Part of your TREC is to come up with the simplest, most elegant solution possible.  It’s not easy and it takes courage.

The other reason I’ve seen through the years for making things more complex rather than simpler is that it’s hard to be held accountable when things are bigger and more complex.  I’ve seen “expert” after “expert” explain away why a plan or structure didn’t work because “who could have predicted something like that would happen in a system so complex?”

Make things simpler, clearer and less complex.  Might you be held more accountable?  Yes!  But high-performance teams hold themselves more accountable than anyone else will.

Simplify, simplify, simplify.  Take out the complexity.  Bring more clarity.  Be a more elegant team.  People will notice.

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BlogTeamTeam Series

Team Elements: Level 4 Happiness

by Ron Potter January 10, 2019

The last Thursday post was an Introduction to Teams. Teams are at the heart of great performance, the greatest happiness, and the best memories. This post starts a deeper breakdown of the elements involved in building and maintaining great teams.

In describing Level 4 Happiness, Aristotle used five words:

  • Truth
  • Love
  • Purpose
  • Beauty
  • Unity

Purpose is the word right in the middle of all five. I don’t spend a lot of time concentrating on Purpose because it is so essential and obvious.

That doesn’t mean it’s not important. I’ve already described it as essential! Without a purpose, there is no team. Without a purpose, it’s just a group of people. They may enjoy each other and have a lot of fun together, but without a purpose, they are not a team.

Team Elements

The bigger issue I often see is a lack of aligned purpose and many times conflicting beliefs on what the purpose is or should be. It is essential that teams align on and commit to a focused purpose. But that’s a topic that would require several blog posts to cover. For these blog posts about Team, I’m going to focus on the four team elements:

  • Truth
  • Love
  • Beauty
  • Unity

I’ve read different books and papers with slightly different words in the last slot. The one that I see most often is Justice, but I’ve focused on the element of Unity because it applies so directly to great teams.

I also try to use team elements that more directly apply to the business environment. Elements like love and beauty are words you don’t often hear in corporate meetings. Using elements that essentially mean the same thing as the original words and yet seem appropriate in the corporate world, I’ve modified the last three words in an attempt to make them immediately identifiable and to help you remember them. The four team elements I’ll explore are:

  • Truth
  • Respect
  • Elegance
  • Commitment

Truth

Truth remains truth for obvious reasons. If a team can’t speak the truth with each other, they will never grow or prosper as a team. However, we need to spend some time discussing the truth. Some of the findings may surprise you.

Respect

The Greeks had several words that all get translated into the English word Love. The Greek word for Love that Aristotle used had nothing to do with emotions or the feeling of love that we have for another person. This word referred to treating the other person with respect. As human beings, we seem to have an innate sense that someone respects us or not. Great teams require great respect (love) for each other.

Elegance

Beauty may be one of the hardest words to understand in a business sense. I’ve chosen the word elegance because Elegance is beauty that shows unusual effectiveness and simplicity. Effectiveness and simplicity are the hallmarks of highly productive teams.

Commitment

I’ve chosen the word commitment here for two reasons.

  1. Commitment is the observable outcome of unity. In team meetings, unity is often expressed by words or a nod of the head, but how one behaves away from the meeting is a clear demonstration of unity.
  2. Commitment leads us to an acronym that helps us remember the four elements.

TREC

The acronym TREC sounds the same as the word TREK. The definition of a TREK is “A trip or movement especially when involving difficulties or complex organization: an arduous journey.”

Building a great team in a complex organization during difficult times is an arduous journey.

  • First, it’s a journey. It goes on for a long time. I might even say it’s an epic journey
  • Second, it’s a strenuous effort; difficult and tiring.

But it also provides the highest level of happiness. When you talk with people about their great memories in life, they will often talk of the time than spent on wonderful teams. The obstacles they overcame. The accomplishments they achieved.

Let’s start this TREC together and see if we can uncover the secrets of building and being a part of a great team. I guarantee it will bring you great happiness, even during a tiring, difficult, arduous journey.

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