Does your team operate as a healthy community? Here are the three things we had to do to stay sane under one roof:

#1: Trust Each Other

To build trust in a relationship, everyone should be able to say the following statements to their colleagues and leaders.

1. I believe that you care about me as a person.
2. I believe that you won’t judge me on second-hand information. If you hear someone saying negative things about me, you will vow to check this out for yourself.
3. I believe that you won’t talk negatively about me to others. If we have a problem, you will come to me to talk about it. If you have to sort things out with someone else first, you will come to me shortly after.
4. If I have a problem with you, I will ask to speak to you privately soon after the offense occurred. I will then:
   • Get clear about what I believe happened that made me feel the way I do.
   • Listen to your perspective and try to understand what you meant
   • Work toward an agreement with you about how we will handle these situations better in the future.

#2: Honor the changes we are all experiencing

Every time priorities, job responsibilities and the make-up of the team changes, so do we. Plus, our lives outside of work are constantly changing. Therefore, we should honor and support each other as we live through change. Periodically, we should renew our relationships by asking:

• How do we describe our relationships? Are they easy? Hard? Why?
• What needs to be celebrated about how we have related so far?
• What can we agree to leave behind?
• What should we agree to continue/stop/start doing from this point going forward?

This is an especially useful exercise when one peer is promoted or given a great new assignment above his or her friends. Looking at the new relationship will help to relieve hard feelings.

#3: Commit to playing together

There is nothing more nourishing and renewing than play. To create healthy bonds at work, you need to laugh with your colleagues and share fun experiences.

Good peer relationships are vital to your success. Bad relationships can be fatal. It’s not enough to make sure everyone is talking. You have to continually talk about how you can get along better to reach your peak of effectiveness. Create a healthy community to ensure your team’s success.

© Marcia Reynolds

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1. Never discuss business in bed.
   When your business partner is also your spouse, you must create spaces where business is not spoken. Stick to this rule even when you get an idea so hot you don’t think it can wait until the next day. Get up and get out of the bedroom.
2. Have a business plan, but prepare to make changes in it as your enterprise grows and evolves.
   Without one, you run the risk of reacting to whatever comes along. A business plan helps you distinguish between what furthers your goals and what distracts from them.
3. Let the talents/interests/tendencies of each partner determine the division of labor and try to stick to it.
   For example, if one of you is creative or gifted in sales and marketing, give him or her free rein.  Appreciate the partner who does the grunt work like book-keeping and ordering supplies.  Agree to delegate essential tasks neither one wants, e.g. a virtual assistant for administrative chores.
4. Impose business hours on your work day so your business doesn’t overrun your life.
   Schedule meetings for specific purposes, take notes as you would in any work setting, and put all follow up tasks on a calendar. Write everything down. A structure, like the division of labor, helps you to avoid duplicating effort and minimizes the chances of important tasks falling through the cracks.
5. Set aside time when you don’t discuss business at all.
   This is tough when the business is fun and/or demanding.  Achieving a good work/life balance is important for its own sake, and your relationship — and perhaps your business as well — will be the better for it. Take an exercise break together or apart. Learn to enjoy being together in silence: reading, meditating, or gardening.
6. Avoid criticism; focus on what works well and what you can do better, individually and as a team.
   Practice communication skills you’d use on a client on each other. Make requests of each other.  Don’t complain.
7. Consult on and make all the big decisions together.
   Let the smaller decisions be made by the one chiefly responsible, then stand by that decision. Of course, this is rarely so cut and dried, but it helps to have the intention and trust each other to follow through.
8. Above all, have fun.
   Learn to laugh at your mistakes. If you’re like many people, you have had work that wasn’t always satisfying or fulfilling. This is an opportunity to create a work environment that WORKS for you, with the person you know better than any co-worker or employee, by your side. Enjoy the journey together and celebrate accomplishments and victories, big and small.

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I’m guilty myself. I see a problem. I assume other people see the problem and that they will define it the same way that I define it. I assume that we all understand what the criteria for a “good” solution will be. And I dive head-first into a conversation where I try to “sell” my solution to the problem as I see it.

Here’s a thought: stop discussing the solution until we agree on the definition of the problem.

In the process, you might ask questions like:

• Do we both agree that there is a problem?
• What is the problem?
• What is the scope of the problem?
• What is causing the problem?
• What would a good solution look like?

Until we reach agreement on these starting questions, we can never agree on the solution to the problem.

How many conflicts could we resolve, reduce, or even eliminate if we all stopped talking about the solution long enough to understand our different ways of defining the problem?

Photo courtesy of www.sxc.hu.

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Part One: Focus on “Strengths”
Starting a new collaborative effort means getting to know each individual’s strengths (the ways that person excels). Listening and watching for what excites an individual can provide powerful clues to his/her unique abilities and interests. Often friends or colleagues can offer useful insights as well.

After identifying individual strengths, we determine what the student group, as a whole, is good at. Are many members good at the same things?  That’s where the group’s success will lie. Do members have varying talents? Then the group’s success may mean fusing their strengths into something new.

Part Two: Share the Power
Once a group begins working from collective strengths, it is important to foster shared power. Students find it useful to determine- ahead of time- how they will work together when issues arise. This involves recognizing who has well-developed communication skills and can encourage others to contribute when things get tough. It also involves deciding in advance how conflicts will be managed- through compromise, reframing, voting or what? When people share equal power- not just at the beginning but throughout the collaboration- they are more apt to freely contribute their resources and gifts to create a real win-win.

Part Three: Approach challenges with a positive “learning focus”
When challenges arise, and they always do, I encourage a positive, “learning focus.”  No matter what happens, there is always a way to learn something new. This approach may not come naturally; today’s students are not used to persisting when their vision gets clouded. But, if their work stops, they lose a valuable chance to learn. That’s why emphasizing a “learning focus” becomes critical.

Collaboration in Action
One semester my students worked with a local nonprofit to design a new brochure. The students were excited about creating something innovative. But the community partner wanted a brochure like those from the past. It seemed there was an impasse- the community partner wouldn’t give in and the students grew discouraged. The challenge: break the collaboration or learn. Fortunately, the students persisted.

Their solution? They made two brochures and let the community partner decide which one to use. The students learned, produced some great samples for their portfolios, and the community partner got the unexpected benefit of two brochures.

Celebrate Successes
These out-of-classroom experiences are gratifying for me and eye opening for students. It’s rewarding to see them recognize their strengths, develop ways to share power, and cultivate a “learning focus.” I know their collaborative work gives them important leadership tools for the future. That’s something to celebrate- and we do!

Photo from www.sxc.hu.

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Despite their differences, the two boys become friends across the barbed-wire fence that separates their two worlds.

Based on the stories they hear from the adults in their lives, Bruno (the General’s son) says that he and Shmuel (the Jewish boy) are supposed to be enemies. You can see Bruno wrestling with this concept starting at the 6 minute 49 second mark in the video with this post.

This movie is set in a time filled with racism and violence. A time when the differences between us became much more important than the similarities. And, I wonder, have people really changed? Have we gotten better? Or, are we just better at hiding our thoughts that condemn others because they are different from us?

As we work to collaborate, build teams, forge relationships, and work with others; can we get past our differences? Is different necessarily bad? Do we all have to look, act, and think the same? Is there room for differences in our relationships? Can we work for common good despite them?

Just because we might be different, are we really supposed to be enemies?

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These are the words I most often use from Managing with Aloha when asked why I feel Lōkahi is the Hawaiian value which conveys teamwork best of all.

When we work within a team, that dynamic of needing to join heads and hands with others is the critical component, isn’t it. We aren’t alone, and we need to function by cooperating with others as best as we possibly can. Beyond simple cooperation we need to collaborate, allowing our shared inputs and ideas to become woven and blended; unified. Compromise may happen, but we hope not; we want better than that cooperation of having to give up something. We want to achieve some new creation of dazzling unity where no one had to give up anything. No bright idea dimmed.

On the contrary, our team ended up being stronger than we initially could even imagine was possible. Not only was there room in the effort for everyone to participate, the effort itself took on a kind of magic, and a new creation was revealed. There was a transformation of some kind, and the transformation may have been us! People emerged from their contributions and their shared working efforts feeling victorious, and saying things like, “Amazing; how incredible was that?” and “Who would have thought we would actually pull that off?”

When teams work together best, individuals emerge bigger than they were before: They’ve been lifted up, or have grown in some way. The Lōkahi unity which was achieved did not diminish anyone, or worse, leave them out. On the contrary, it gave them the possibility to explore a potent capacity they weren’t even aware they still could explore. The most successful teams are those which make individuals stronger and more confident in their own abilities: They have witnessed how their contributions served others.

So my question for you today is this: When you begin working with a new team, or with your existing team at the start of a brand new day, are those outcomes I have just described the outcomes you set your sights on? What goal do you have in mind?

This is how I will describe Lōkahi from now on: I will own it in my Kuleana (my personal sense of responsibility), and say, “Lōkahi seeks my harmony with bringing people to creative agreement. It is my value of cooperation, collaboration, and unity.” I am that common thread. I am that defining critical one in the success of each team I engage with. I don’t mean that it is all about me, not at all. I do mean it is about my own behavior, my own contribution, my own initiative, and my own willingness to cooperate with the greater desire to collaborate. Lōkahi teams do not happen without Lōkahi people.

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