Have you ever noticed that in business, we have strategies for everything — everything, that is, except people?
Think about it. Most leaders will sit down and thoughtfully design all kinds of strategies with their team: goals, growth, skillset, compensation plans…everything EXCEPT the team dynamic. Because that’s a tough conversation to have. How do we get along? What kind of culture/team do we want? How do we want to handle conflict? What language do we use? How do we want to feel about each other?
All that touchy-feely stuff is something teams often avoid. But outside of the business world, it’s exactly those types of conversations that make great relationships. It’s only with our healthiest, most successful relationships that we talk about what we need, or how we communicate. We debrief after an argument with our significant other: When you said this, I felt this. We tell our friends we’d rather they didn’t say this or that.
But we don’t do that in a business setting. Instead, we tend to interpret what we experienced and think we know what it meant. If someone said XX, he meant YY. We’re sure! We don’t take into account that in that circumstance the behavior might have been and outlier. It might not be who they really who they are.
Businesses need to talk about people, because businesses are made up of people. Get a strategy for your team dynamic, and all those other strategies? They’ll thrive all the more.
Photo by Natalie Pedigo on Unsplash
