The Value of Teams

I had so many plans for my first post here with Unrealist. Posts about helping your team work together more efficiently. Posts about helping your projects be on time and budget.

Instead, I'm writing a post about allergies.

Yes, allergies.

Let's roll back time a bit here. A few months ago I started trying to bring some team building and development work into my crew's weekly team meeting. Thanks to some amazing techniques I've picked up from my many mentors (Lynne Levy, Nicole Tanzillo, Stephen Rogers, and Ben Routson just to name a few to whom I owe thanks), we've made a lot of changes to our team meeting structure - which I'll hopefully write about another time. My favorite change, however, is that we now start each call with Something Good. We all go around the team and share something we're happy about or proud of from last week.

This really helps set the mood for the entire call - I couldn't believe what a difference it made. Starting the call with the good puts us in a better mindset for any troubleshooting we to do. It brings us closer together as a team. It helps us all remember that we need to maintain balance in our lives - at home and at work (however that works out for all of us in 2020!)

Anyhow - Last week, I got hit hard by allergies. My daily allergy meds weren't cutting it - I had to add Benadryl into the mix. My face was raw from my eyes watering and blowing my nose and my brain was in a fog from antihistamines. Embarrassingly not at my best. I jumped into our team meeting with more of a plea than a request: Please, tell me some good things.

There was no way I could have kept structure in that meeting. There was no way I could give feedback or direction on on-going work. But I still needed to check in with everyone. We spent the hour moving between good things in our lives and good things at work - and what we can do to keep having good things. I left that call feeling so much stronger and ready to take on the pollen-filled world.

Afterwards, I was thinking about how amazing it is and how privileged I am to have a team that not only kicks ass on a daily basis, but that also views me as a part of the crew. They recognized that a team member was having a terrible day and they had their team member's back.

This has been a rough year for all of us, but I think it wasn't until this moment that I realized how little resilience I currently have - and how much I can lean on my crew for support, the same as they lean on me.

This week for Something Good, I have the best answer: My Team.