Everyday Drills
Whether in a sport, at a job, or in a family, everyone everywhere is part of a team. The Everyday Drills blog is designed to create a moment each morning where we are intentional about becoming better teammates and team leaders. Subscribe for thoughtful ways for you and your team to be challenged each and every day.
Responses to Good Decisions
Leadership requires a person to have a certain level of awareness of who they are leading. It is unwise to question the validity of good decisions simply because they elicit an unexpected response of intense emotion from teammates that already have a history of strong emotion toward necessary change. This is not to say that leadership should plow ahead regardless of the resistance they face. Leaders should consider the source of the resistance and the necessity of the resisted path in leading the team forward.
A Short List
The need to be correct and have everyone conform to that correctness is a sign that someone may be a bit high-maintenance. When correctness is placed above the well-being of a team, we have an inflexible teammate. There are topics that should have a narrow view of correctness but the list of those topics needs to be as short as possible. Inflexible and high-maintenance people tend to have a long list of narrow views and this makes it difficult to interact positively with them.
Flexible means not stubborn.
How is the important team attribute of flexibility identified? The easiest way is to see whether someone is stubborn. Great teams have a lot of opportunities to measure stubbornness and flexibility because they have great feedback loops. If someone refuses to budge when confronted with solid feedback, they are not flexible. No adjustment is needed because they don’t think they are wrong. In fact, the stubborn teammate may even think the rest of the team needs to adjust while they stand their ground. This is obviously a problem for any team dynamic and must be resolved before any team can hope to move forward.