“I’m sure you’ve all heard the adage “Teamwork makes the dream work”, but what exactly is a team and why is teamwork such an illusive quality that provides real competitive advantage?
Have you ever considered that one is a very small number for greatness.
Just think about it, every great enterprise has begun with at a team of at least two people. Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak led to the founding of Apple, Five talented musicians led to the formation of The Beatles and the story goes on and on.
By channeling the efforts, talents and resources of ourselves and our team members not only can we succeed faster and easier but also, through leveraging our combined resources, we are able to operate as a high performance team, and achieve more.
When individuals and teams are in a peak performance state, they are in a state that is often called Flow, where they are Joined Up and aligned.
Put simply, Flow is the path of least resistance. When team members are in Flow, productivity rises, results increase, occurrences line up, team members have more fun and feel more connected to the organisation.
Flow is a state in which a person is fully immersed in an activity, caught in a feeling of energised focus and full involvement. It is focused motivation, where the emotions are not just contained and channelled but positively energised and aligned with the task at hand.
When people are immersed in Flow, they can experience a distortion of time as their internal clock doesn’t seem to match the external clock. You may have experience this yourself
When team members are feeling stressed, overwhelmed or anxious, it’s a fairly good indicator that they are out of Flow. The opposite is true when they are in Flow, they feel joy and even rapture whilst performing the task; they are fully engaged.
In the work place, Flow can be seen where an individual’s challenges and skills are equally matched, thereby creating a harmonious environment.
When team members are in Flow the following occurs:
- Complete involvement in what they are doing – focused and concentrating
- A sense of ecstasy – a sense of being outside everyday reality
- Greater inner clarity – knowing what needs to be done, and knowing how well they are doing
- Knowing that the activity is doable – that their skills are adequate to the task
- A sense of serenity – no worries about oneself, and a feeling of growing beyond the boundaries of the ego
- Timelessness – thoroughly focused on the present, hours seem to pass by in minutes
- Intrinsic motivation – whatever produces Flow becomes its own reward
As difficult as teamwork is to measure and achieve, its power cannot be denied. When people come together and set aside individual needs for the good of the whole, they can achieve more than would appear possible on paper.
When teams are aligned behind a purpose that everyone resonates with, then office politics and confusion are eliminated. Team members gain a sense of connection and belonging by being part of something and this increases team engagement levels and satisfaction levels.
If you’d like to better understand how to leverage your talents and time, get into flow and discover the roles where you can add most value to a team, you could invest in a Talent Dynamics Assessment. You can purchase it here.
Wishing you a flow filled week.
Julia Felton (aka The Business Wrangler) is the founder of Business HorsePower. Business leaders, entrepreneurs and executives hire her to accelerate their business performance by harnessing the energy of their people to work more collaboratively together. By aligning purpose with actions the team achieves exponential results as everyone starts pulling in the same direction.
Julia believes that business is a force for good and through designing purpose-driven businesses that leverage the laws of nature, and the herd, you can create businesses founded on the principles of connection, collaboration and community that make a significant impact in the world.
