Office gossip and rumours.
Backstabbing.
Team friction, frustrations and arguments.
Though you know that conflict, ill feelings, a “frosty vibe”, gossip, frustration, and team misalignments – unity and harmony issues – no matter what size or situation, must be addressed.
They can’t be swept under the carpet nor can they be wished away, no matter how hard you try.
They’re like a cancer that can seriously impede the success of your team and organisation if left to fester and spread, and you know they will…..it’s only human nature.
For any team or organisation to achieve its Vision, it won’t be possible if you don’t have unity and harmony between your people.
The effectiveness of individuals and teams will always be positively or negatively impacted by the positive or negative relationships that exist between them.
Do you have unity and harmony issues within your team or organisation? What are they?
How effective are you at discerning tension between members of your team?
To create positive relationships within the team, leaders must deliberately focus on strengthening and growing relationships within their teams. Sometimes this happens naturally, but sometimes people need a little help.
Remember – you can pick your friends, but often, you can’t pick your work colleagues. You as the leader need everyone to work well together to increase trust and to bring about and maintain positive thinking to generate and maintain positive energy and action.
Without positive energy within your team, you won’t get very far, no matter how much pressure you apply.
Do you have positive or negative energy within your team?
Does your team environment foster cohesiveness?
Ultimately, to create good working relationships to develop unity and harmony, you need to have established what I like to call a “winning team culture” – a culture that nurtures and spurs on each team member as individuals, and fosters relationships between individuals working together as one, to achieve the Vision.
The starting point to developing a winning team culture is to build the heart and spirit of individuals in the team or organisation you’re leading.
Winning teams have unified and harmonious hearts and spirits that are for each other and are with each other.
When the heart and spirit of an individual turn to the negative, it’ll seriously affect the environment, culture, and relationships between individuals, as I’m sure you well know. Often it only takes a small thing that can then unravel the whole team if left unchecked.
The heart and spirit in individuals need to be aligned with trusting relationships, and individuals must be empowered positively to believe in themselves and each other.
This is like oxygen for all teams and organisations. Without it, it’s like trying to drag your team forward in high altitudes with no oxygen tanks – very slow and painful going, with a high chance that you’ll collapse or fall off the mountain, so to speak.
It’s up to you as the leader to lead this process – you can’t just leave it up to your people and hope for the best – you must be very deliberate and focused on putting into place strategies that will enable and assist your people to work together cohesively, working and thriving together as a team.
This is when the magic starts to happen.
STRATEGIES TO BUILD THE HEART AND SPIRIT OF YOUR PEOPLE
There are some key strategies I use to build the heart and spirit of people to build unity and harmony, and in today’s blog, I’ll talk about the first of these, with more to follow in upcoming blogs shortly. Stay tuned.
The first strategy I use is to identify the different personalities that exist within a team.
There are 4 different personalities as outlined by Florence Littauer in her book, “Personality Plus” – Sanguine, Melancholy, Choleric, and Phlegmatic. It’s imperative when you’re leading people that you, and the members of your team, understand the types of personalities you have around you.
Different personalities have different strengths and weaknesses and are therefore suited to certain roles over others, and, some personalities connect better with certain personalities more so than others too, no matter how hard they try.
When you can make individuals on a team understand we’re all different, and why we’re different, and that we all have different strengths we can bring to the table to win, you begin the vital process of allowing team members to understand one another better and you start to build the unity and harmony within your team.
When people have a greater understanding of themselves and each other, it gives each person a new perspective and often a new appreciation of each other, or at the very least, it helps them to accept the people they don’t naturally get along with.
Understanding the different personality types also allows you to put the right people in the right roles. When you do this, it also promotes unity and harmony (plus saves you time and money in recruitment and staff retention) as individuals can flourish in their role and can add maximum value to their team members.
When you have the wrong person in the wrong role, it can lead to that person frustrating their teammates, causing division.
From time to time, my wife and I have couples reach out to us who are experiencing marital issues. The first thing we do with couples is to do a Personality Profile test with them. You can see the scales come off their eyes about what their differences are with their strengths and weaknesses. This leads to greater acceptance of each other and it leads to increasing unity and harmony within the marriage.
Having been married for 34 years, raising two strong sons; without us understanding our personality strengths and weaknesses, we wouldn’t have been able to stay together. It has been a game-changer in both our professional and personal lives.
Do you know the different personalities within your team?
Do you know your personality type?
Do you know the personality type of your partner?
Can I encourage you to take the time to read Florence’s book – ‘Personality Plus’ and do the profiling test at the back of the book? It will change your leadership, and your personal relationships dramatically.
Knowledge is power and this knowledge certainly allows you, and your leadership team, to lead your people more powerfully, and for them to interact and work together much more effectively and harmoniously to achieve the Vision.
You can’t build anything great on your own, and you definitely can’t build anything awesome with a team that has unresolved friction or division.
“Compatibility is overrated. What’s required is unity. Unity doesn’t mean you’re the same. It means you’re together.”
The Gottman Institute.
I really trust today’s blog has stimulated and agitated your thinking to achieve your Vision.
Take care and keep climbing,
Peter
