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How to get the best from your team!
How do you get your team to work together selflessly, tirelessly and enthusiastically even under the harshest of conditions to accomplish a challenging goal with the best results?
In the spring of 2014, I lead a team of 10 (plus local translators) on what some would describe as the project of a lifetime. They worked long hours under harsh conditions, often with little equipment, in resource poor areas to benefit some of the most socially neglected people in the world: children with Cerebral Palsy living in rural Vietnam. We were on a mission to educate both their parents and health professionals in the communities where these children live.
Our team of volunteers came from 4 countries and most did not know each other before the project. As team leader, I had never met 2 of the participants and knew one only peripherally. They also came from a wide range of disciplines: a doctor, nurse, therapists and social worker. Also a young man who has Cerebral Palsy, someone to help us with the money management and a videographer. The size and diversity of the team presented its own logistical challenges.
Despite endless hours of planning, things did not always go as planned. When the road we were traveling on by bus to visit children in their homes was blocked by construction we hired motor bikes to take us the rest of the way. Riding motorbikes through the back roads of Vietnam was more excitement than our team had anticipated. Decisions like this often had to be made by the team on the spot.
In spite of the challenges this team far exceeded our original goals. We trained over 100 families and 40 health professionals in 4 locations. This was our original plan, but we went far beyond that by laying the groundwork for more extensive training next year as well as a pilot project for service delivery in rural areas and the first Cerebral Palsy conference ever held in Vietnam. This all arose from the adaptive creativity of the team experience.
But what created such a synergy of ideas? Why did the team work so hard for no pay and little glory on a project for people who could not even say thank you or even "like" us on Facebook? Maybe the team didn't fully know what they were getting into but their enthusiasm for supporting future projects indicated they had no regrets.
Don't you wish you could get this kind of commitment from your team members? Well you can. Because people will do almost anything if they believe in the cause and it's an adventure.
How to have an adventure.
So what makes an adventure?
Two elements need to be present and go hand in hand in creating an adventure: certainty and risk. They need to be tied together with a sense of adventure. That means hanging on to the certainties for dear life and viewing risk as an opportunity to learn how to do things better. Add in a dose of fun and you've got an adventure!
Certainty:
The element of certainty has to come from the team leader's absolute commitment to the cause. You can't fake this. As team leader you need to have done your homework. You need to have first convinced yourself of the worthiness of the cause.
Prior to this mission, I had personally spent 12 weeks in Vietnam. Six of those weeks were spent exclusively researching and attempting to understand the conditions of children with Cerebral Palsy at a very intimate level. I was unequivocally convinced of the merit of this cause.
You may have noticed that I said cause not project. That was deliberate. Project is more about a process where a cause is about a vision. The vision needs to be communicated with the team members. Storytelling is very effective for achieving this and I think it was my stories that convinced most of the members of the team to take part.
Despite my certainty about the cause, it wasn't immediately obvious what process we should use. This project was unique and there was nothing to model it on so I created a delivery model with feedback from team members. But would it work? Would we have to make changes as we went? Would the team tolerate the uncertainty of the model on top of all the other challenges? This is where the risk came in.
Taking risks
A good adventure needs the element of risk because it heightens creativity and, if well managed, infuses some fun. In fact many people are at their very best when there is a chance that something can go wrong or already has.
In the case of our Vietnam project, we were dealing with a lot of uncertainty (or risk) that could have rendered the whole project a failure. In addition to the motorbikes fiasco, we had to respond to police scrutiny, lack of equipment, extreme heat, and scheduling changes.
I was very open with the team, both prior to and during the trip, about the challenges and uncertainty we would face, although I had no idea about the motorbikes. It's important that as much as possible the team understand what they are going to be up against. But with all of these challenges there was sure to be some frustration on the part of team members. We planned for that by incorporating daily debriefs into our schedule.
How to maximize team creativity and results:
Give everyone a safe place to share their feelings.
The difference between a debrief and a meeting is that there is no agenda. Team members could talk about anything they wanted and everyone got a turn. It is the job of the facilitator to keep it on task and productive.
The skill of the facilitator is key to the productivity of the debrief. In Vietnam, we were fortunate to have a social worker as part of our team who also does group facilitation. He ran the debriefs which gave people a lot more latitude to talk. As team leader, I had too much personally invested. I was concerned that the team might feel like they were criticizing me if they aired any negatives.
I purposely distanced myself from the feedback process by asking someone else to facilitate the debriefs. And it worked. At first people were a bit hesitant to share but when they saw how I responded (or didn't) they became more candid about how they felt things were going.
As the team leader, if you ask people to share their feelings you have to be deeply committed to letting them do that without cutting them off, rebutting or justifying. They may say things that you don't want to hear and there can be no hint of retribution for doing so.
It's helpful, as team leader, to go in with the mindset that people really do want to be constructive. In the rare case where a team member is involved in a power struggle with the leader this needs to be dealt with outside of the team realm, and with a skilled facilitator. Otherwise, if you can nurture the opportunities within the "feedback" it's amazing what can grow in that fertile space.
When people feel comfortable sharing their feelings, trust and intimacy develop but what grew out of that went far beyond all expectations. Team members starting building on each other's suggestions and synergies began to take place as creativity took hold.
The team didn't want to just tweak the delivery model; they came up with whole new ideas. For example, what started as a suggestion to hold day long information sessions in each location where we worked soon became the first national conference on Cerebral Palsy in Vietnam. One person initiated the idea, but everyone jumped in and contributed something.
Recognize that everyone has something valuable to contribute.
Some team members needed to be encouraged to share their ideas during the debriefs. Whether or not they saw it themselves, everyone has something to contribute. One way to maximize the results of the team's project is by recognizing everyone's contribution. Sometimes the people who don't appear to be "team players" have the most to contribute.
One of our team members worked perhaps harder than anyone. But when we weren't working, she more or less kept to herself. I had only met her briefly before the mission but I had done my homework and invited her to the team because I was confident of her skills in her area of expertise. The problem was that we just didn't connect on a personal level while we were on the project.
I couldn't tell where she was in terms of commitment to the whole project so I just gave her space to do her thing. Yet in the end, she had great ideas for taking our work forward and expanding it. In the end, she committed strongly and she will be a key player in shaping and delivering our future programs.
Get out there and have fun...
The challenges of this mission were daunting both for the team and for me as team leader. We were doing serious work in harsh conditions with altruism as our only reward. Yet the camaraderie of the group and a healthy dose of humour made it all very rewarding.
The camaraderie did not happen of its own accord. The team had a safe place to share their feelings and everyone knew they were a valued member with something to contribute: and most importantly we believed in the cause and were having an adventure. To learn more about this adventure please go to http://www.NOJFoundation.com
Laverne Bissky has recently taken a team of volunteer experts from 4 countries on 3 continents to Vietnam to work in remote rural areas under harsh conditions with few resources in order to support children with Cerebral Palsy and their families. To contact Laverne to speak at your next retreat, workshop or conference please visit http://www.Bissky.com
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