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Respect

BlogLeadership

You can lead a horse to water but he doesn’t know your resume.

by Ron Potter

I know, the actual quote says “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink.”  The essence of the proverb is that you can give someone an opportunity but you can’t force them to take it.

I’ve had a couple of horse-related experiences lately that got me thinking.

Equestrians

I have two granddaughters who are both equestrians.  I was watching one granddaughter take her horse through the paces in the arena and then cleaning and grooming him afterward.  During my time in the arena, I watched as she guided the horse through different patterns and speeds.  What amazed me was that I couldn’t discern what she was doing to get the horse to speed up, slow down, turn left or right.  It was almost as if the horse knew what to do and she was just along for the ride.

After her ride, she was washing, cooling down and grooming her horse.  Once again, I was amazed to see this petite young woman work around this half-ton animal with no concern for getting kicked, shoved or bitten.  You could see the complete trust between them.  So that was my first clue.  Trust!

After she released her horse to the pasture, I asked her how she got the horse to work through the different maneuvers without doing much in the saddle.  Her answer was simple.  “I just shift my weight and the horse knows that I want to do.”  Trust and understanding!

Dallas the Leadership Horse

An article appeared in the Wall Street Journal titled “How Dallas the Leadership Horse Glues Teams Back Together.”

The article was about a company called WorkHorse that hosts team-building workshops.  One story was of a team that was given the assignment to get the horses to move into a pre-defined circle in a certain amount of time.  After no success and with just three minutes to go in the exercise, one of the team members dispensed with the pleasantries, walked up to Dallas the Leadership Horse and began scolding him.  “Sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to do!” she said.  Then she leaned against him and started pushing.

Kristen de Marco who founded WorkHorse, says she’s seen this scenario play out before.  “Under pressure, some humans resort to treating equines like recalcitrant office workers, issuing orders, making threats, dangling incentives, even shoving them.  None of it works.”

She says that horses can sense when a stranger’s energy doesn’t feel genuine, or fails to line up with their body language, or conveys something other than trust and respect.  If you’re bossy, overconfident or inauthentic, horses just tune you out.  “They can’t read your resume.  They only care about who you are in the moment.”

Leadership and Teams

The bold emphasis in the previous paragraph is mine.  But look at the words.

  • Under pressure
  • Genuine
  • Trust and Respect
  • Who you are in the moment

They can’t read your resume!  They only care who you are in the moment.

This blog post was supposed to be a break from the Team outline that we’ve been working on since the first of the year.  But it seems to have fallen right back in step with the lessons we’ve been learning along the way.

Who are you in the moment? Genuine?  Authentic?  Trusting?  Respectful?

How are you treating the other person in the moment?  Being genuine and respectful is the only means by which leadership and teamwork are successful.

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BlogTeamTeam Series

Team Elements – Respect: Summary

by Ron Potter

Over the last several blog posts we’ve been working on the framework for great teams.  The four elements in the framework  include:

TREC.  The dictionary defines a TREK as “a movement, especially when involving difficulties and complex organization: an arduous journey.”  I realize that TREC and TREK are slightly different, but I always want to add an element that helps you remember a concept or framework.  Notice that building a team includes difficult and complex organization and is an arduous journey.

Teams don’t just happen.

Just because you gather together a group of people at roughly the same level in an organization, that doesn’t make them a team.  It’s simply a group of people who have some of the same goals and many different goals.  Leadership teams are charged with lining up the goals of all the participants, regardless of their personal or functional goals.  Sometimes those personal and functional goals need to be sacrificed in order to move the team goals forward.  It’s an arduous journey.

There is a fifth element that was not included in the list but needs to be checked and that’s Purpose.  The reason I tend to minimize the Purpose goal is that I assume leadership teams know what their collective goal is or should be.  However, if that’s not the case, this fifth element will jump to the top of the list to be solved first before the TREC can begin.

Truth and Respect

So far we’ve worked through the details of Truth and Respect.  We summarized Truth and I would like to summarize Respect in this post.

We need to look at the individual pieces of Respect as covered in the last three blog posts but there is also an important principle that relates to the combination of both Truth and Respect.

Respect

Individually, Respect can be made up of several elements.

Team Strengths
  •  Humility
    • When someone does not demonstrate humility, it’s hard to believe they have respect for others.
  • Development
    • When leaders believe it’s worth their time to grow and develop people, it demonstrates respect.
  • Compassion
    • People are motivated by being treated as human beings.  Not by what they do or don’t do, but who they are.
  • Patience
    • Stay calm, don’t get annoyed, turn back to Humility, Development, and Compassion
  • Kindness
    • “Giving someone what they need the most, deserve the least at great personal expense.”  Chip Ingram
Team Weaknesses
  •  Envy
    • Envy occurs when someone feels inferior to others.  It’s destructive, first the one who envies, then those around them.  When someone is dealing with envy, help them develop.
  • Anger
    • Anger eruptions are seldom positive.  Helping the team express anger and disappointment in a safe environment helps in dealing with loss and adversity.
  • Grudge
    • Grudges are usually caused by envy and anger but they just keep surfacing.  Deal with the envy and anger constructively to stop the grudges.

Truth and Respect

There is also a powerful force when a team is both very truthful and yet maintains great respect for every individual.  Amy Edmondson is may be the best-known author to identify the concept that when both Truth and Respect are present, a team experiences “psychological safety.”  Amy and others have shown through research that when psychological safety is present, teams perform the best.

Truth and Respect are necessary individually but when combined they help teams perform at a level that is much higher than expected.

Respect, Often the Missing Element

After spending nearly 30 years working with leadership teams, my experience has been that respect is often the missing element holding teams back.

Truth: Overt

“Truth” tends to be overt.  People say it.  Or more accurately, people blurt it out.  The problems happen when someone believes they have the truth and everyone else simply has a perspective.  I’ll write more about perspective in an upcoming blog about modern-day philosophers.  Billy Joel says in one of his songs “the only people I fear are those who never have doubts.”  If you have no doubts about your “truth”, you’re probably wrong.

The other thing I’ve seen happen on teams as they deteriorate, the truth turns sarcastic.  Yes, it is the truth but it certainly doesn’t get expressed with any respect.

Respect (lack of): Covert

I find a lack of respect to be covert.  Nothing is really said out loud or face-to-face but outside the room, there are comments made about a person or a position that is not very respectful.  Issues that remain covert are the most difficult to handle.  I know that people seem to think it’s kinder to remain silent and they’ll avoid the expected conflict created by being overt.  But anything that remains covert is always more difficult to work out.

Truth and Respect.  These are the first two steps in our TREC to great teams.

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BlogTeamTeam Series

Team Elements – Respect: Envy, Anger, Grudges

by Ron Potter

We’re continuing our series on building great teams.  Great teams happen when we have

We’re still working our way through the Respect series with the final set of circumstances of Envy, Anger, and Grudges.  No, great teams don’t possess these attributes, great teams avoid these attributes. Envy, Anger, and Grudges are team weaknesses that can be lethal to your team’s well-being.

Envy

Envy is the first of the team weaknesses we’ll discuss. Great teams snuff out envy whenever it rears its ugly head.  Here are some attributes of Envy:

  • Discontented or resentful by someone else’s possessions, qualities, luck, or accomplishments, style or attribute.
  • An emotion which occurs when a person lacks another’s superior quality or achievement.
  • Desires to deprive another of what they have.
  • Delights in degrading those who are more deserving.

Envy occurs when someone feels inferior to others and will do what they can to undermine or chop down those who possess more or achieve more than themselves.

At its roots, this is a comparison issue.  Always comparing yourself to others is a losing battle.  Jordan Peterson in his book 12 Rules of Life: An antidote to chaos states in rule number 4 “Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.”  Comparing yourself to who you were yesterday puts you on the path of growth.

I once had a pastor who was fond of talking about the little boy pushing his wagon up a hill.  As soon as he sat down in the wagon to rest, he found himself at the bottom of the hill.  Never stop growing!  Never stop learning!  As soon as you give up on your own growth and development, envy creeps in.   You begin to be resentful of what others have or what others have become.

Envy is destructive.  Its first target is yourself.  Its second target is those around you.  As Jordan Peterson says, an antidote to chaos is to continue growing.

Anger

As the second of the team weaknesses, Anger that is directed at circumstances or failures can be healthy if it is channeled properly.  Eruptions of anger are seldom positive.  Expressing anger and disappointment in a safe environment can help everyone deal with the loss and adversity.

I’ve often run exercises with teams that have experienced great loss and disappointment.  Working in small groups I allow each person to express their emotions by writing them on flip charts.  No holds barred.  Get it all out.  Once the teams have exhausted the extent of their anger, we take the flip charts that were created, post them on the wall, share them with each other and then hand every chart out to members of the team.  They are then instructed to tear the flip charts into as many pieces as possible, throw the pieces into the middle of the floor (expressing as much anger as they can while doing so) and then we all jump on the pile of pieces and stomp on them as viciously as possible.  By the time the stomping has slowed to a stop I always witness a moment of somber quiet.  But then someone breaks out in a big grin.  Another joins them.  It soon turns to laughter and people start expressing how cathartic the exercise was.  In one form or another people shout out “Wow, I haven’t felt this good in a long time!”  The anger dissipates.  Calm heads return.  And a new determination emerges in the room to move on, work hard, figure out how to overcome and get better.

All too often the anger remains covert.  People assume they must hold their head up high, don’t complain and keep going.  When things remain covert it’s almost impossible to deal with them.  Once we brought out the anger in an overt but healthy way, new energy emerges from the team and it makes it possible to move forward.

Grudges

The third and most subtle of the team weaknesses, Grudges can be caused be either envy or anger but they just keep resurfacing over time.  It’s probably because it remains overt until that moment when it erupts once again.

One of my teams referred to the practices as “replaying old tapes.”  Something would happen on the team that didn’t seem to make sense to me and finally, someone else would explain, “Oh, they’re just replaying old tapes from what happened a few years ago.”  A few years ago?  Are you kidding me?  People are still holding and expressing grudges after a few years and no one has dealt with it yet?  Amazing.

Leaders and teams must call out grudges and put a stop to them.  Maybe it will take a team exercise like the anger one described above.  Maybe it will take some one-on-one discussions with the leader or a coach.  Maybe a leader needs to decide to help a team member move on if they can’t get past old issues.  Grudges can be like deep infections.  They continue to resurface.  Sometimes a mild antibiotic will heal an infection.  I dealt with one of those antibiotic-resistant infections a few years ago.  It took a direct injection of the most powerful antibiotic every three hours for six weeks.

Infections can be tough to deal with.  Grudges can be just as tough because they pop to the surface periodically.  You must get to the root of them and deal with them to have healthy teams.

In this post, we’ve talked about the team weaknesses you should avoid to build great teams.  In the previous post, we talked about the positive things that need to be present to develop great Respect within teams.  We’ll wrap up Respect with our next post to pull it all together with focus.

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BlogTeamTeam Series

Team Elements – Respect: Patience, Kindness

by Ron Potter

In our last post, we looked at the first three elements of great respect: Humility, Development, and Compassion.

Respect is the second component of great teamwork.

This week we’ll unpack further elements of Respect: Patience and Kindness.

In our final post on Patience, we’ll explore Anger and Grudges.

Patience

In today’s high paced world of do, do, do and go, go, go, we seldom think of patience as being an element of great teams.  The early Greek word that Aristotle would have used always related to people, not projects.

One of our modern-day dictionary definitions says:

Stay calm and not get annoyed.  Especially when something takes a long time, or when someone is not doing what you want them to do.

Another definition talks about not responding with annoyance or anger when faced with pain or suffering.  Patience doesn’t happen without suffering.

How often do you get annoyed by the pain and suffering of delay or what we see as incompetence?  If you’re like me, the answer is “way too often.”  However, it’s important to make sure that we don’t distribute the frustration and annoyance evenly.

When we’re part of a team it means we have responsibility and accountability to the team and team members.  Situations can be annoying.  Systems can be annoying.  People can be annoying.  But, if our goal is to grow the team, experience our own growth within the team,  and accomplish some great things together than we must keep our annoyance in check when it comes to people.

Annoyance can and will be triggered for many different reasons.  I could never list all the reasons but many that come to mind for me include:

  • Someone moving too fast or too slow to satisfy me.
  • Not doing the work the way I think it should be done.
  • Focusing on the long-term when we have pressing issues in the short term.  And vica versa.
  • Not honoring the values of the team in their work

Without going into great detail let’s look at some quick answers or reasons why you shouldn’t think of them as annoying

  • Everyone moves at a different speed.  The key is to know what deadlines are real and sticking to them.  Hold team members accountable when deadlines are missed.
  • We each work in different ways.  The key is the outcome.  Did you or the teammate get the results that were expected and needed?  If not, make sure clarification is achieved with everyone.  I’ve found that teams at high levels don’t spend enough time on clarification because they assume they’ve been there before, they assume they understand what is needed, they assume their pace and approach will be sufficient.  Notice the word assume used in every case.  I still remember a high school teacher explaining that “assume” makes an “ass” of “u” and “me.”  Don’t be an ass.  Don’t assume.
  • Each of our brains works in different ways.  On the Myers-Briggs assessment, there is a function referred to as the perceiving function.  Those who land on the “intuitive” side of perception think in conceptual terms.  They focus on the future and must have an image of what that future should be in order to deal with the daily details.  Those who fall on the sensing side of that function, work very much in the “here and now” so that they can understand how to get to a future state.  Both ways of perceiving are valid.  But each can also annoy the other.  Appreciate, honor and use the differences to help the team achieve at the highest level.

Kindness

I’m going to go back to Aristotle’s original word for this category which is Love.  I’ve converted his original word to Respect because I believe business teams are less confused by the word Respect.  As I’ve mentioned earlier, the Greeks had several words that English translates into the word love.  The word that Aristotle used was agape.  I’m going to use a definition that I believe was put forth by Chip Ingram.

“Giving someone what they

    • need the most
    • deserve the least
    • at great personal expense.”

Need the most

This implies that you’ve gotten to know a person well enough to know what they may need at the moment.  Do you know your teammates as human beings or simply as human doings (know them for what they do, not who they are)?

Deserve the least

I haven’t met many business leaders or team members that have bad intentions.  However, I’ve observed a lot of bad action.  People often do things that are counter to their intentions.  A person may have just done something that makes us think they don’t deserve help, assistance, care, understanding, etc.

At great personal expense

Kindness requires that we sacrifice some of our own needs to provide what another person needs the most at the moment.  It may require us to provide the time that we don’t seem to have at the moment.  It may require us to have the courage to step into a situation that would be must easier to simply avoid.  It may require us to delay crucial decisions to build team unity.  There is a cost.

I’m going to close this section with a line from one of my favorite books titled Anyway – The Paradoxical Commandments by Kent Keith.

People really need help but may attack you if you do help them.  Help people anyway.

Patience and Kindness are at the heart of building great teams!

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BlogTeamTeam Series

Team Elements – Respect: Humility, Development, Compassion

by Ron Potter

Teams are at the heart of great performance, great happiness, and the best memories.  These blogs are built on the 4 Levels of Happiness by Aristotle.  In his framework, Aristotle says that the highest level of happiness will be achieved at Level 4.  In describing Level 4 Happiness, Aristotle Used five words:

  • Truth
  • Love
  • Purpose
  • Beauty
  • Unity

Love (Respect)

The Greeks had several words that are all 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.  It’s about what we do, not how we feel.

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.

In unpacking the concept of Respect (or love), we will look at the following concepts over the next couple of posts:

  • Three elements of building Trust: Humility, Development, Compassion
  • Patience
  • Kindness
  • Envy
  • Anger
  • Grudges

In our last post, we looked at Psychological Safety (both Truth and Respect being at their highest level).  Research has indicated that Psychological Safety is one of the best indicators of high team performance.

This post will start a series digging deeper into the concept of Respect.  How do we define it?  How do we use it?

Humility, Development, and Compassion

These are three of the eight concepts that we learn from my book, Trust Me are present with great leadership.  Let’s look at each one and see how they relate to Respect.

Humility

When someone does not demonstrate humility, it’s hard to believe they have respect for others.  Lack of humility becomes self-focused.  When someone is self-focused, they are not “other” focused.  Humility means that I have an interest in your opinion.  Steven Covey listed one of his 7 Habits of Highly Effective People as “Seek to understand first before being understood.”  When someone wants to know what I think before sharing with me what they think, I feel respected.  I feel like my opinion counts.  I’m more interested in their opinion because they were interested in my opinion first.  I feel respected.

Development

When a leader believes it’s worth their time to grow and develop me, I feel respected.  Leaders dedicated to development will provide straight and meaningful feedback.

I once worked with a client who told me their boss was a wonderful person, always positive and encouraging but not very useful.  They went on to explain that all of their performance reviews were great with nothing but good feedback.  However, it gave them nothing to work with.  There were no suggestions for growth or betterment.  Therefore, it just wasn’t very useful.

Positive Development means straightforward feedback about what’s working and what is not working with suggestions for development and follow-up on efforts.  Taking the time to develop people demonstrates respect.

Compassion

I would often get negative comments about this topic when we first published Trust Me.  Many managers would express the sentiment that they were not running a charitable organization; they were running a business and business was rough and tumble, not soft and cushy!

I started dealing with this question by asking these rough and tumble leaders about their doctors.  Did they like doctors that looked at the lab results only and treated them as numbers on a graph or did they like doctors that related to them as human beings first and then talked to them about how the clinical numbers might be affecting their quality of life.  They all like doctors who were professionally competent but treated them as human beings first and foremost.  The same is true with your teammates.

You want a teammate who tells it to you straight but knows you as a human being first.  We are not motivated or encouraged by people who treat us as a human ‘doing’ (relating to what we do rather than who we are) rather than a human being.  If we’re treated as human beings (which means we’re respected) first, we are much more likely to respond to our fullest.

Patience, Kindness, Envy, Anger, and Grudges.

These are concepts that we’ll look at in our next post about Respect.

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BlogTeamTeam Series

Team Elements – Respect: Psychological Safety

by Ron Potter

Resect

We continue our series on teams and the elements that make up great ones. Teams are at the heart of great performance, greatest happiness, and the best memories. These blog posts are built on the 4 Levels of Happiness by Aristotle. In his framework, Aristotle says that the highest level of happiness will be achieved at Level 4. In describing Level 4 Happiness, Aristotle used five words:

  • Truth
  • Love
  • Purpose
  • Beauty
  • Unity

In this series of posts, I’ve concentrated on the four words of Truth, Love, Beauty, and 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. Without a purpose, there is no team.

I also try to use words that more directly apply to the business environment. Words like love and beauty are words you don’t often hear in corporate meetings. Using words 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 to make them immediately identifiable and to help you remember them. The four words I’ve used are:

  • Truth
  • Respect
  • Elegance
  • Commitment

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.

In unpacking the concept of Respect (or Love), we will look at:

  • At least three elements of building Trust: Humility, Development, Compassion
  • Patience
  • Kindness
  • Lack of Envy
  • Anger directed at issues or situations, not people
  • No grudges

Psychological Safety

If we look at these first two (Truth – Respect) together, a very powerful concept of psychological safety begins to emerge. Psychological Safety is present every time a team achieves greatness and can even become a predictor of greatness.

Google thought it would look at many of their teams around the company and see if they could figure out what made a high performing team. I believe they looked at 340 teams and in the end, could not find any pattern that predicted high achievement. Or more accurately, they found too many patterns to reach any conclusion until they found the concept of psychological safety.

Amy Edmondson at Harvard is one of the more visible proponents of psychological safety. Once Google built in a psychological safety measurement into their team assessment, there was a correlation between high performing teams and psychological safety.

Psychological Safety on Teams

Having psychological safety on a team means that the truth is spoken, not holding back anything and at the same time, there is so much respect for each person, people feel safe in stating or hearing the truth. These are the first two elements of the highest level of happiness. Teams that can speak the truth with complete respect not only perform at a high level, but they are also a joy to be a part of.

I think that one reason holding teams back in accomplishing complete psychological safety is that people assume truth and respect are at the opposite ends of the same spectrum. I can either speak the total truth, even if it means that I hold people accountable for their failures or shortcoming (one end of the spectrum) or I can show total respect to someone, therefore I must hold back the complete truth (opposite end of the spectrum). But this is a false understanding. We need to think of these two elements as two different dimensions on a chart.

For instance:

  • The vertical dimension may be labeled “Truth” with complete truth at the top and lack of truth at the bottom.
  • The horizontal dimension may be labeled “Respect” with total respect to the right (at the end) and lack of respect to the left.

This leaves us with a two x two grid (which consultants love).

  • Lower Left – Low Truth and Low Respect = Insensitive and Manipulative
  • Upper Left – High Truth but Low Respect = Aggressive and Obnoxious
  • Lower Right – Low Truth but High Respect = Empathy but no accountability
  • Upper Right – High Truth and High Respect = Psychological Safety

Great teams express great truth and have total respect for team members.

Elements of Respect

We’ve pointed out the value of both Truth and Respect here in this blog. In the next few blogs, we’ll explore the elements of great respect including:

  • Humility, Development, and Compassion
  • Patience
  • Kindness
  • The benefit of the Doubt
  • No Envy, Anger or Grudges

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BlogTeamTeam Series

Team Elements – Respect

by Ron Potter

We started this blog series about teams in early January of this year. Teams are at the heart of great performance, greatest happiness, and the best memories. These blog posts are built on the 4 Levels of Happiness by Aristotle. In his framework, Aristotle says that the highest level of happiness will be achieved at Level 4. In describing Level 4 Happiness, Aristotle used five words:

  • Truth
  • Love
  • Purpose
  • Beauty
  • Unity

In this series of posts, I’ve concentrated on the four words of Truth, Love, Beauty, and 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. Without a purpose, there is no team.

I also try to use words that more directly apply to the business environment. Words like love and beauty are words you don’t often hear in corporate meetings. Using words 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 to make them immediately identifiable and to help you remember them. The four words I’ve used are:

  • Truth
  • Respect
  • Elegance
  • Commitment

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.

In unpacking the concept of Respect (or Love), we will look at:

  • At least three elements of building Trust: Humility, Development, Compassion
  • Patience
  • Kindness
  • Lack of Envy
  • Anger directed at issues or situations, not people
  • No grudges

Psychological Safety

If we look at these first two (Truth – Respect) together, a very powerful concept of psychological safety begins to emerge. Psychological Safety is present every time a team achieves greatness and can even become a predictor of greatness.

Google thought it would look at many of their teams around the company and see if they could figure out what made a high performing team. I believe they looked at 340 teams and in the end, could not find any pattern that predicted high achievement. Or more accurately, they found too many patterns to reach any conclusion until they found the concept of psychological safety. Amy Edmondson at Harvard is one of the more visible proponents of psychological safety. Once Google built in a psychological safety measurement into their team assessment, there was a correlation between high performing teams and psychological safety.

Psychological Safety

Having psychological safety on a team means that the truth is spoken, not holding back anything and at the same time, there is so much respect for each person, people feel safe in stating or hearing the truth. These are the first two elements of the highest level of happiness. Teams that can speak the truth with complete respect not only perform at a high level, but they are also a joy to be a part of.

I think that one reason holding teams back in accomplishing complete psychological safety is that people assume truth and respect are at the opposite ends of the same spectrum. I can either speak the total truth, even if it means that I hold people accountable for their failures or shortcoming (one end of the spectrum) or I can show total respect to someone. Therefore I must hold back the complete truth (opposite end of the spectrum). But this is a false understanding. We need to think of these two elements as two different dimensions on a chart.

For instance:

  • The vertical dimension may be labeled “Truth” with complete truth at the top and lack of truth at the bottom.
  • The horizontal dimension may be labeled “Respect” with total respect to the right (at the end) and lack of respect to the left.

This leaves us with a two x two grid (which consultants love).

  • Lower Left – Low Truth and Low Respect = Insensitive and Manipulative
  • Upper Left – High Truth but Low Respect = Aggressive and Obnoxious
  • Lower Right – Low Truth but High Respect = Empathy but no accountability
  • Upper Right – High Truth and High Respect = Psychological Safety

Great teams express great truth and have total respect for team members.

Elements of Respect

We’ve pointed out the value of both Truth and Respect here in this blog. In the next few blogs, we’ll explore the elements of great respect including:

  • Humility, Development, and Compassion
  • Patience
  • Kindness
  • The benefit of the Doubt
  • No Envy, Anger or Grudges

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BlogTeamTeam Series

Team Elements: Level 4 Happiness

by Ron Potter

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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Aristotle Strikes Again

by Ron Potter

photo-1431540015161-0bf868a2d407

As reported in the New York Times recently, Google embarked on an effort to build the perfect team. And as Google would be prone to do, they began to collect data in search of a pattern. As one participant stated, if anyone is good at recognizing patterns it’s Google. I don’t think there’s any argument about that.

However, after collecting data on hundreds of teams the first problem they ran into is that they couldn’t find a pattern. Or more accurately they found too many patterns which is just as much of a problem as finding none at all. So the search continued.

In the end they did find two very interesting correlations that seemed to be present on every good team. Not surprisingly those two elements were trust and respect. The two of them together formed an environment that has been labeled ‘psychological safety.’ If the team members feel psychologically safe because trust and respect has been built, the team will become a high performing team. (Tweet this)

Another pattern that began to emerge however was the productivity of these teams over multiple problems and projects. Teams that fell short on psychological safety didn’t seem to perform well at any kind of problem. Conversely, teams that exhibited psychological safety seemed to perform well no matter the nature of the problem. So the one element that people most often assume to be a needed ingredient, subject matter experts, didn’t seem to make any difference if there was no trust or respect.

Now, here’s the part I enjoyed. The internal name for the effort was called the Aristotle Project. One of the foundational structures that I always introduce to the teams I work with is Aristotle’s Levels of Happiness. The fourth and highest level describes the five things needed for great team work. In Aristotle’s word they include: Truth, Love, Purpose, Beauty and Unity. Every team needs a purpose but to accomplish that purpose they must be able to share and speak the truth, do it in a loving respectful way, in the most beautiful and elegant form possible and finally reaching a commitment of unity. Without those elements a psychologically safe environment doesn’t exist.

Although I’m glad they actually made the effort, had they simply started with what Aristotle knew they could have saved a lot of effort in figuring out what makes great teams.

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