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Team Building: TransCompetition
By harveyrobbins | July 29, 2007
I’ve beat the dead horse of high performance teamwork for some time now. I’ve even mentioned the bad things about being too collaborative. I thought it is time to get a more balanced view between being too collaborative (supercollaboration) and too competitive (supercompetition). A concept I call TransCompetition.
Think of TransCompetition as a grafting of fruit from the two trees of competition and collaboration. Each tree has fruit that’s good, and fruit that’s not so good. The job of your high performing team is to combine the best of both trees, the best attributes of each approach, for the task currently facing your team. Here are some of the fruits of both trees.
The will to greatness vs. the will to commonality. High performance teams require both ambition and humility. Ambition drives us to try great things. Humility lets us survive to try again when we screw up. As great as ambition is, the will to commonality may be greater. It seeks to find win/win solutions, common ground even when positions seem cast in stone.
Focus vs. empathy. This can also be called inwardness versus outwardness - valuable but opposite skills. Inwardness is capable of focusing on the task at hand to the exclusion of nearly everything else. Outwardness is forever scanning the horizon for more to understand.
Persistence vs. insistence. These are as different as conquistador and natives, the killer instinct and the instinct to survive. Persistence is heroic, the willingness to die for a cause. Insistence is about survival - in order to keep the cause alive. What is your teams purpose?
Results vs. process. A results orientation is an attentiveness to the “what” of the team: did we meet our goal? A process orientation is attentiveness to the “how” of the team. Did we deal with each other or our customers appropriately? It is imperitive for high performing teams to be both outcome driven and process oriented.
Play vs. work. Play is a team’s genius - its ability to generate, innovate, revolutionize from thin air. Work is why we show up when we don’t feel so playful. TransCompetition means abandoning the pain principle for the pleasure principle: work for the fun of it.
Personalization vs. depersonalization. Personalization is the talent for communicating in such a way that the person you are talking to feels the message has been custom-tailored to his or her understanding. It is a precious skill on high performing teams. But depersonalization is also very powerful. It is detachment, the ability to see a thing without regard to its effect on you. When detachment comes in, out goes paranoia, disrespect, and the blindness that so often accompanies self-interest.
Loose vs. tight. Which structure is stronger, one that is elastic but encourages innovation and experimentation, or one that achieves coherence through the imposition of order? Loose relationships permit wider latitude for expression - but tighter relationships, unions, and alliances have the power to effectively underwrite security. Let duration be your guide. If you are in imminent danger of destruction, tighten the bonds between yourself and others. If your survival issues are longer-term, let loose the line and encourage free minds to find solutions.
Think TransCompetitively!
Topics: Team Building At Work |