"Team player", "Team", "Teamwork" - are terms that are so so so often used in our lives whether it's at college or getting your first job and even as we progress in our careers. Everybody as an individual talks about being a team player and many of us are true team players too.
Everybody knows the traditional definition of a TEAM and what it takes to be a team-player but in this blog I'll talk about something more deeper than accomplishing a common task. I'm going to talk about the impact of EMOTIONS in accomplishing that one common task.
Let's boil down a team of 'x' members to a team with just one member - that's you. Now imagine, you're working on a project to accomplish a goal. You set a plan and start executing the plan. The good thing about this project is that there are no external dependencies so it's perfect right! You don't have to depend on anyone to move forward in your project. The first few days are super, you put in the 10-12 hours daily and everything goes well the first week. By the end of the week you're extremely motivated and plan your task for the next week. On completion of your week 1, you decide to take it easy over the weekend and go out with your friends for a drink. The party you thought would get over by early night really ended the next day morning. You're extremely tired and want to hit the sack as soon as you reach home. So now your weekend goes for a toss and you're running a bit late on your schedule but no worries still. You're motivated and tell you're self that I'll cover up in the coming week. You then begin your work motivated but then at the start of the week itself run into major technical issues and start getting worked up because you're not able to solve them. You put in another day's effort but still the issues dont get resolved. Finally, you decide to make some desperate calls and you don't find the intended solutions. You've started to get a headache and just try to get some rest. Once you're up, you think about the situations and start getting angry at the fact if you hadnt partied, you could've got 2 additional days. Everything starts turning glum and demotivation starts setting in. Your project now takes 5 weeks to complete that could've just taken 2.
What I want to highlight with this story is that with a 1-member team and no external dependencies things can go for a toss due to the impact of emotions. In this example, it started with high motivation, happiness, sense of accomplishment, relaxation then turned into extreme stress, anger and demotivation.
Now imagine a bigger team. Everyone in the team when working towards a common goal bring a wide range of emotions towards the work. Some of the members may be very highly motivated and think about the organizations success, some may be highly motivated but may think only about their success in the goal, some members may just be doing the tasks for the sake of doing them and instead prove to be a hindrance in other's work too and some may bring their outside emotion to work maybe like a fight in the family, a sudden loss, failure or success and even internal/external competition.
The bigger task is for the leader who needs to manage everybody's emotions and also his/her own emotions while working on achieving targets.
So for the leaders out there: achieving your goals with your team is one thing but managing your team members emotions while achieving goals is a whole new story!
Everybody knows the traditional definition of a TEAM and what it takes to be a team-player but in this blog I'll talk about something more deeper than accomplishing a common task. I'm going to talk about the impact of EMOTIONS in accomplishing that one common task.
Let's boil down a team of 'x' members to a team with just one member - that's you. Now imagine, you're working on a project to accomplish a goal. You set a plan and start executing the plan. The good thing about this project is that there are no external dependencies so it's perfect right! You don't have to depend on anyone to move forward in your project. The first few days are super, you put in the 10-12 hours daily and everything goes well the first week. By the end of the week you're extremely motivated and plan your task for the next week. On completion of your week 1, you decide to take it easy over the weekend and go out with your friends for a drink. The party you thought would get over by early night really ended the next day morning. You're extremely tired and want to hit the sack as soon as you reach home. So now your weekend goes for a toss and you're running a bit late on your schedule but no worries still. You're motivated and tell you're self that I'll cover up in the coming week. You then begin your work motivated but then at the start of the week itself run into major technical issues and start getting worked up because you're not able to solve them. You put in another day's effort but still the issues dont get resolved. Finally, you decide to make some desperate calls and you don't find the intended solutions. You've started to get a headache and just try to get some rest. Once you're up, you think about the situations and start getting angry at the fact if you hadnt partied, you could've got 2 additional days. Everything starts turning glum and demotivation starts setting in. Your project now takes 5 weeks to complete that could've just taken 2.
What I want to highlight with this story is that with a 1-member team and no external dependencies things can go for a toss due to the impact of emotions. In this example, it started with high motivation, happiness, sense of accomplishment, relaxation then turned into extreme stress, anger and demotivation.
Now imagine a bigger team. Everyone in the team when working towards a common goal bring a wide range of emotions towards the work. Some of the members may be very highly motivated and think about the organizations success, some may be highly motivated but may think only about their success in the goal, some members may just be doing the tasks for the sake of doing them and instead prove to be a hindrance in other's work too and some may bring their outside emotion to work maybe like a fight in the family, a sudden loss, failure or success and even internal/external competition.
The bigger task is for the leader who needs to manage everybody's emotions and also his/her own emotions while working on achieving targets.
So for the leaders out there: achieving your goals with your team is one thing but managing your team members emotions while achieving goals is a whole new story!
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