Nieuws ― How being rude could now save your team.

Are you also experiencing how working remotely changes the dynamics of your team? Are you noticing signs of resignation and loss of sense of urgency with team members? Do you find yourself giving motivational speeches to a screen full of muted black squares? What if making things explicit could unleash a renewed energy?

Reading the mood of your team probably used to be the first thing you did walking into the office. It’s also likely that this same office atmosphere was why you loved your job. Next to the constant availability of inspiration and feedback, workers miss the inside jokes, the rites and habits, the uplifting remarks that created the specific spirit of their team and kept them smiling at work. Team leaders find it hard to rally their coworkers into action now that everybody works in their own bubble, at their own pace, feeling more and more alienated from the teams they work with.

The colleague who marks each success by bringing cake, the co-worker who pushes the others to take a stand, the one who drives everybody mad by always rushing into a project but in the meantime makes you all rev up your game… Their superpowers can lose all potency when confronted with the cold hard laptop screen.

How can team leaders maintain the strong points that make their team flourish? A first step could be to discuss what your team values. What is it that makes the team tick? Talk about what energizes you and should therefore be safeguarded, what you enjoyed and now miss, but even so what new habits could replace or expand this. Be as concrete as possible when collecting behaviour examples and then agree on what you want to preserve and what could evolve given the new context.

It could very well be that once you’ve decrypted your mode of operation, you ought to be a bit blunt. To explicitly ask whom interacted with whom, if they found a way to joke around, or performed any other action that you labelled as important. Even though it might feel rude to intrude in their personal space, you'd essentially be highlighting and summoning their individual superpowers. You would be acknowledging their importance for safeguarding the group dynamics. You'd be allowing the team to take notion, evolve and adapt to the new circumstances.

Now could be the perfect time to (re)shape your teams’ dynamics, while there is still room for freestyling and iteration. Soon you’ll need your team up to its usual standards and more, able to rise to any future challenge, united and smiling. (Re)design your business experience with Intent (and let me know how you're doing!).