Team outreach for family solidarity
TEAMS train an almost exclusive focus on performance delivery; however, in the process of becoming the ultimate performance delivery units of the enterprise, teams find out that they also have to become the enterprise’s basic solidarity units. And as such, individual members of teams have to internally cohere and mutually support each other; and teams as such have to look outward to other teams in the enterprise and at least to the families of their individual team members.
The outreach in solidarity towards the families of individual team members is a “natural” demand of the spirit of solidarity. As teams seek to give life and nurture the spirit of solidarity in team work, they find the need to underscore the solidarity values that individual team members have to observe, personally, in order to have something of value to bring to the team table. The underscoring extends to inter-personal relationships between team members so that the team becomes a haven for mutual support and encouragement. Finally, the underscoring is further focused on individual team members helping each other struggle to forge a proper governance character as they journey together with others towards becoming all-around, duly accomplished, happier (because much better) individuals.
In actual life, the same solidarity values also need to be fostered and nurtured in the homes of individual team members. At home too, for a happy and healthy family life, personal governance values have to be observed and practised; spouseto-spouse relationships have to be strengthened by dint of daily details of refinement in providing mutual understanding and support to each other; and in the upbringing of children, special attention has to be given to the formation of a strong moral character and in their responsible use of freedom. The solidarity values of an enterprise team, therefore, have strong resonance in, and clear resemblance with, the solidarity values of any family hearth and home.
Thus, it comes as part of the natural process of team progress that the main focus of any enterprise team’s continuing outreach initiative, pitched outside the enterprise, should be trained first and foremost at the families of individual team members. Given the limited time and resources of teams, only a few initiatives can be considered, such as the following:
• An informal exchange of positive experiences, drawn from actual life, of solidarity values individuals bring to their marriage and to their family, especially as these apply to spouse-to-spouse relationships. In fact, this initiative can be undertaken under the auspices of the “gender and development agenda,” which is being actively pursued in the bureaucracy and in society as a whole.
• A set of case discussions on age-appropriate upbringing of children, with the aim of forging a strong moral and governance character in them, and with special focus on their training in the responsible use of their freedom as they go through the different stages of life.
• A sharing of actual experience in observing the governance discipline and how such discipline can be brought to the home and the family. Families of individual members of the team can be introduced into the proper adaptation of a governance charter, a road map, and performance scorecard to their respective family situations.
Enterprise teams need to restrain themselves from trying to go “a bridge too far” when it comes to undertaking an outreach initiative to the families of their individual members. Careful consideration will have to go into the limits of time and resources as well as into the openness and readiness of the families themselves. Instead of being over-ambitious, such an outreach initiative will have to be undertaken one step at a time, seizing whatever opening that may be on offer at any given time. The key idea, however is: teams have solidarity experience, which they can share with the families of the individual team members; and solidarity better lived at home can reinforce the solidarity as it is practised in the basic solidarity unit of the enterprise.