Upshot:
- Pulling your team together to galvanize something transformational will generate benefits now and far into the future.
- Your Teammates are struggling in some way you’re likely unaware of thanks to Super VUCA, and they need your attention.
- Doing something transformational as a Team in the Age of Stuper VUCA requires Agility, Super Focus, Simplicity, and Clarity.
- For best results get your team away from the office to avoid distractions and create the context for a powerful emergence.
Having your team snap together right now is imperative. As team leaders, we probably don’t realize how much difficulty our teammates are having due to all the distractions and stressors of Super VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity). If you want to move forward as a team, you must create space for them to come together. You can’t just tell them what needs to happen—you need to show them how it’s going to happen and give them the chance to create it themselves. By pulling your team together, you’ll be able to overcome the challenges of Super VUCA and create a vision that will inspire a team to work towards making it real. This vision needs to be something you’re all committed to, something that will benefit everyone in the long run. It doesn’t have to be dramatic. It just has to be something that’s meaningful for each person on your team, so they can feel personally invested in its success.
Super Teams are made up of people who have been involved in planning, who have been given an opportunity to express their opinions and have those opinions taken seriously by leaders who believe in their ability to make good decisions.
Team leaders can easily miss how people are struggling with all of the life and workplace changes of the last several years. You can close this gap by creating space for them where they can open up about what’s going on in their lives and get support from one another—and from you! People need to create a safe place where they can be honest about what’s happening back home or how much stress they’re feeling at work because of all these changes; doing so will give them permission to be vulnerable and authentic and contribute vitally.
Organizations are rapidly becoming aware that the team status quo has changed. People are looking for greater meaning. They need to be part of something bigger and better.
Team Super Growth Stages
A Super Team is an organization’s elite team of highly-skilled and talented individuals who collaborate to achieve extraordinary results that no individual member could have pulled off alone. Teams become Super through Four Growth Stages:
- Forming – Learning about each other and the team’s purpose
- Informing – Learning about Super Teams
- Transforming – Adopting Super Team Behaviors and Practices
- Superperforming – Achieving Order of Magnitude Results; Stabilizing in the Steady State
Steps to Pulling Your Team Together
1. Host a one or two-day off-site or virtual off-site team strategy and planning session. Use a capable facilitator to optimize the experience and free you to participate as part of the team.
2. Re-celebrate your team. Have everyone on your team share their personality profile and important insights.
3. Identify what a super win look like in this new environment. Fully involve the team In the conversation. The goalposts may have moved.
4. Redefine or clarify the team’s main objectives and strategy. Are they still valid in the new normal?
5. Identify what must change to execute the strategy. Dors the team have the right cadence and vibe?
6. Re-establish trust and healthy dialogue on your team. Teach your team the difference between a Team and a Super Team. New teammates, social distancing, remote, hybrid, or on-site work flux, possible layoffs or pay cuts may have eroded healthy relationships on your team. You’ll have to work to bring them back.
7. Develop a healthy dose of Servant Leadership. As a leader, your tone and message must be optimistic and inspiring and authentic to engage and align the troops.
8. Identify which elements of your team’s process and culture are working in the current environment and which must be transformed. Assure your team is grounded in the art and science of Super Teams and committed to nothing less than a super win – for both every teammate and for the team itself.
Summary
By pulling your team together, you’ll be able to overcome the challenges of Super VUCA and create a vision that will inspire a team to work towards making it real. This vision needs to be something you’re all committed to, something that will benefit everyone in the long run. It doesn’t have to be overly dramatic. It just has to be something that’s meaningful for each person on your team, so they can feel personally invested in its success.
—– Synergia is a Corpus Optima Practice that integrates Organism Thinking, Servant Leadership, Super Change, and Agility to help teams become Super Teams. Synergia focuses uniquely on the simultaneous transformation of both the team (system level) and the teammate (agent level).
Take the first step. Explore how Synergia transforms Teams into Super Teams.
