Teamership: Supporting others
Supporting others needs to serve both parties - you and the person you are seeking to support. Photo by Wonderlane on Unsplash
The two central questions of Teamership and being a great team member across multiple teams are:
Am I bringing my best?
Am I bringing out the best in others?
A secret that many great team members know is to make the answer to the first question and also the answer to the second. That is, to define your best as a contribution to personal and collective performance. To frame part of your success as your ability to support others to do great work.
With that in mind, it is useful to consider the question of…
In which ways can I best support others to be at their best?
There are so many ways that we can help other people. Sometimes the answers are practical and tangible - you may help colleagues by taking some of their workloads if you have the capacity to do so. This tends to work as long as it is temporary and infrequent - doing it too often can actually reduce the capacity of both you and your colleagues (in different ways). You may provide psychosocial support through your direct and indirect actions that contribute to psychological safety. It could be both practical and psychosocial - it is amazing how often food and drink are cited as ways to do this! It’s not that surprising when I think about it - I am definitely better after a coffee or once I am fed if I am getting hangry!
The point is that, without too much time or effort, most of us can find plenty of ways to be of value to our colleagues. The question is then about how best to support others.
Relying on altruism - that individuals will help others for no personal benefit or even to their own detriment - is a risky and unreliable approach. Supporting others needs to serve both parties - you and the person you are seeking to support.
To support others to bring their best, we need to be able to offer the help that they need. In my former professional life, I was a primary school PE teacher (I loved that job!). The range of kids that I worked with varied from 5-year-olds on their first day of “big school” to 12-year-old junior representative athletes. The range of help that I could offer varied depending on the student and the task. Quite often, I would tie the shoelaces of a kindergarten student - they couldn’t kick a ball if they were tripping over themselves. The conversation with the junior representative athlete was often about their strategy or preparation.
Same deal at work. The support you offer will depend on the context of those you are seeking to support.
The support that you offer also needs to align with your own preferences, capabilities, strengths and capacity. If the support that someone needs is the stuff that drains you or is outside of your experience and expertise, it is possible that the “help” might be doing more harm than good overall. That is the sort of thing that we would do in a short term time of need, but not a pattern to establish or maintain. It is more sustainable to support in a way that energises (or at least doesn’t drain) you. This is the support we can offer more often and for longer.
There are times when we would like to assist others but don’t have the skills, capacity or expertise. This is a scenario where I see a lot of people fall into a trap that could be the workplace equivalent of a carer’s fatigue. A very useful thing to remember in these circumstances is the value of connecting others with support. In fact, research by Gartner suggests that “Connector managers triple the likelihood that their direct reports are high performers, and also drive employee engagement by up to 40%.”. That principle can apply to all of us across all of our teams.
There is more complexity to supporting others than is immediately obvious. For that reason, it is worth reflecting on the best ways that we can support others. A few questions for you to consider this week:
What are ways that others value your support?
When does supporting others energise you?
Do you ever offer support that makes it difficult for you to sustain?
How can your connections serve others?