You Are a Team.

How do you get better performance from a team? Say, for example, you were coaching a soccer team and you wanted to win more games. Would you assemble the team and say, “Play better team! Score more goals! Move faster!” ? Probably not. Or, if you did, you probably wouldn’t spend much time with this approach before moving on to other strategies like working with sub-groups and individual players so that they could make specific, important contributions to the collective effort.

When we increase demands on ourselves we tend to take the ‘yelling at the team’ approach instead of the individual training approach. We do this even though we know a team’s performance is the result of individuals working towards a common goal. You need each of your players contributing peak performance.

At this point, feel free to switch up the metaphor of a Team with that of a Community or a Family etc. The point is that there is more than one participant in ‘you’ and it’s helpful to identify each and train them individually to get peak performance from each.

The first (and simplest) roll call of your team members is this: the Personal You, Professional You, and Relationship You. Most of the time these team members work together so seamlessly we think of ourselves as one person. But when we ratchet up the intensity (or when life does that for us) it gets a little easier to see the limitations of our Personal, Professional, and Relationship capacities. Furthermore, it becomes evident how stress on one player can wind up stressing the whole team.

Now that the team members have been named (at least in this basic way) the problem of zeroing in on specific strategies, innovations, and improvements becomes simpler. Performance gains are more forthcoming.

Next time you notice stress, or confront a challenge, ask yourself “which team member’s part of the field is the stress coming from: Personal, Professional, or Relationship?” Which player needs to be supported…or challenged to greater performance? Making this a habit can lead to a greater enjoyment of the game, and more wins for your team.