In late November I spent three trying days holed up in a hotel room in Prague nursing Covid while my colleagues from iOpener (Vik Kumar, Oriana Tickell, Marien Perez and Sean Kwan) delivered a leadership programme to fifty wonderful people.
Depressing and disappointing. But my enduring memory is how my colleagues (including my colleague Saul Draper back in the UK office) looked after me, checked in frequently with how I was feeling, ensured I was fed, and re-arranged my flight home while re-designing our programme with one less facilitator and earning 5* feedback. And I am told they looked after me without a plan – just stepping up when need be, then resting and staying aware of what might be needed.
Perhaps six years ago, a different selection of us had a gig in Tallin in Estonia. The day before, we flew via Warsaw where we discovered that our onward flight had been cancelled and there was not another before noon the next day – about three hours after we were due to start delivering a programme. My colleague Mark Thomas worked the phones while I quizzed the airline staff and Jill Collett kept us all calm and focused. We ended up flying to Oslo, staying over, then doing a short hop to Tallin the next morning, arriving at the venue at 8.55 for a 9.00 start. And it worked, our client was unruffled.
It worked because while we were sorting an alternative flight, our colleagues back home were already sourcing a hotel in Oslo airport, booking a taxi to pick us up on arrival and briefing our other colleagues on site on how we wanted our group rooms set up.
“Teamwork” as an idea, as a virtue and key competence is so ubiquitous that I am really pleased if you have read this far. But we need to extract teamwork as a way of behaving from the doldrums of ubiquity. It really matters, especially when the chips are down. That is the test of teamwork: do colleagues step up or step back when things get hairy?
As I reflect on these two experiences, I notice that we lay the foundation well before the chips get hairy. We know each other well and like each other. We share our ‘stuff’ – not everything but enough to know what we’re each carrying as we do the work. That’s not only the hard stuff but also things like my daughter getting a fabulous job while I was working away. My colleagues knew I was waiting for that call and celebrated with me when it came.
This may sound cosy. But we are very different in what we bring, in our ways of working and in what most energises us. We variously bring the perspectives of the journalist, psychologist, improviser, and logician. We find that we focus on different aspects of a programme design as we each work to get fully on board – some need the ‘why’ first, some the ‘what’, some the ‘how’, some the headlines and some the detail. But that is a ‘yes, and’ choice, not an ‘either / or’: all those things must become clear, and we work together to make that happen.
It strikes me that both the experiences I have described attest to the importance of a shared purpose: serving the client. That may sound a bit of a cliché, but it matters. That purpose is supported by serving each other. Sometimes the needs of clients and the needs of colleagues may appear to be in opposition, but we must find a way to meet both, knowing that often the latter supports the former.
So, what have I learnt about teamwork? Seven lessons:
Together these things entail taking a 360-degree view: what do I need, what do my colleagues need and how do we harness these to meet the needs of the client?
The payoff is doing good work, getting joy from the experience, and each fulfilling our own individual purpose – something that can, perhaps surprisingly, best be done through teamwork.
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