Teamership: Why we Team
I read a fair bit in the space of teams, leadership and performance. I’m not as widely read as some colleagues, but I invest a lot of time and effort into understanding concepts that are relevant and useful to the work that I do. Not just because it’s “work”, it’s also because I love learning more about these topics. Which is why I have made it my work!
Anyway, (almost) every book that I read has some useful ideas, frameworks and actions that I can readily apply to my work and life.
Consistently, I (almost) never implement any of those things. At least not immediately or consistently.
The exception to that is Why We Sleep by Professor Matthew Walker.
It had a profound effect on the way that I function day to day. I now treat sleep with a lot more respect than I used to. Before the book, I wouldn’t think twice about forgoing sleep - and wouldn’t think that my subsequent poor physical performance, mood or cognitive capabilities had anything to do with my poor sleep habits.
Turns out that sleep has a profound impact on almost every aspect of our lives. In listening to the book, the things that are impacted by sleep almost became a joke. Good sleep has been linked to positive outcomes and bad sleep linked to negative outcomes in:
Cognition
Mood
Physical performance
Cancer
Cardiovascular diseases and events
Dementia
There are plenty more, but you get my point
It seems reasonable to suggest that a drug which had the ability to have positive impact on all of those things and more with no negative side effects would be something we’d all like to get our hands on. Yet we don’t. Overall, we tend to sleep poorly and don’t have a full appreciation for the impact of that.
The parallels to teamwork are strong.
Good teamwork has been linked to positive outcomes and bad teamwork linked to negative outcomes in:
Profitability
Revenue growth
Strategic execution
Decision making
Customer experience
Productivity
Collaboration
Resilience
Innovation
There are plenty more, but you get my point
If there was a subscription which offered all these benefits, we’d all sign up. Yet we don’t do the work that will make high performance in our teams more likely to happen more often.
As I was reflecting about writing this post, I realised that it can feel like the answer to “why we sleep” is “because we are tired”. In many ways, that is true. We sleep when we are tired. We sleep as an obligation that is forced upon us by our biology. Sleep can feel like an inconvenience (especially in a society that tells us we should be hyperproductive all the time, bro!)
The actual reason that sleep exists is to maximise our capabilities as humans.
Exactly the same with teams.
We feel like we team when we have to. When we are forced to collaborate or when our ability to get the task at hand done by ourselves is limited. Teamwork takes effort, commitment and often slows us down.
Teamwork exists to maximise our capabilities as humans.
That is the answer to why we team.
Just to be excessively explicit. This is the point that I am trying to make:
Much like sleep, teamwork is central to humans performing well.
We typically don’t treat either sleep or teamwork with the seriosity* that we could and that is a huge opportunity on both fronts.
If you want high performance, sleep well and team up!
There’s evidence for that. This study even found that we help each other less when there is poor sleep and has potential for societal scale effects.
Here are some questions to consider this week:
Can you list the benefits that you think high performance teamwork offers in your context?
If there was an app that offered some of those potential benefits, would you download it?
*I know that seriosity is not really a word - yet!