The ultimate test of team work
THE governance essentials under solidarity and team work demand quite a great deal out of the team leader and members of the team. They all have to participate in team visioning; everyone has to actually get on board the team governance train, with everyone actively pitching in and contributing to the eventual attainment of the team vision. In the process, two complimentary features have to be highlighted and observed: solidarity with subsidiarity; individual effort for the team, and team members working in concert with each other. The challenge for any team is to get all these essentials in place as the team works towards delivering its performance commitments to the enterprise’s (or the family’s) transformation program.
In trying to meet these demands of solidarity and team work, it is easy for the team leader and the members of the team to get lost trying to grapple with trees and to lose sight of the over-all solidarity forest. Grappling with individual trees in the forest can be so attention-grabbing that they (the team leader and team members) can easily forget what in the final analysis solidarity and team work should deliver. Outside of meeting the team’s performance commitments, the final bottom-line should be that through team work, the different members of the team, including the team leader, should come out becoming much better all-around individuals. At the end of the day, team work should serve individual team members such that they become much better persons in every facet of their personal life.
How might team work accomplish this fundamental end-goal? • First, by helping and motivating individual team members to do their work well, with the highest possible “perfection” they are capable of. As the saying goes, good work (work well done) makes for good individuals (i.e. they become much better persons precisely through their work). Thus, by deep personal involvement in helping the team attain its team objectives, individuals use their personal talents to the hilt, and they thereby become much more accomplished all-around individuals.
• Second, by patience and endurance in trying to work well with the other members of the team. This may call for understanding of others; recognizing the good points (and the not so good points) that they have, and learning to take those into account, making adjustments to accommodate those points (i.e. warts and all). In the process, we can learn from the many good points of the other members of the team, while turning mostly a blind eye to the points they may still have to improve on. All this would ask for broad-mindedness and big-heartedness, both of which are crucial for one’s own personal improvement and development.
• Third, by looking beyond the team (or the family), which necessarily is made up of only a few members, and into the manifold challenges the bigger enterprise (or the wider community) faces. By doing so, the team leader and the other members of the team get to sport a more expansive view of the work they do and the many efforts — sometimes heroic — they have to exert. Such an expansive view can add meaning to team effort, team work, and team solidarity. They enable individuals to give more concrete substance to their spirit of idealism, and a more specific answer to the higher calling for their generosity.
Teams and the spirit that gives life to them are embedded in our DNA. It is natural that each one of us should belong to them; it is up to us to tap into their great power and huge potential; but it is also up to the entire team to ensure that in the end the benefits of the spirit of solidarity and team work should redound to the over-all improvement of each one of us.