I’ve been dragging my feet around for the whole summer to a point where some people were worried about me. I’m not sure why or what caused the drag but there definitely was a drag. The other day one of my buddies sent me a link to a blog. I read a couple articles and I fell in love with the organizational tools (it remind me of some of the tools I’ve made for you on this site).
More importantly, there is an article on team building that talks about the different ingredients needed to form a great team.
Here are some point from the article:
- There are people who are driven intensely by the ambition to create exceptional experiences. The key word here is ambition, and I could see it in the face of everyone I interacted with. Ambition is one of the prerequisites for effective action. There are many times where the desire for exception experience is expressed, but when the ambition is lacking there just i no personal investment driving the action forward.Expressing the ambition is the mission. I think a good team knows that it’s the magic that they’re creating that’s important, and removing barriers to letting the ambition express itself fluidly is one of the prime metrics of a good team. By “expression”, I mean that ideas and desires are made visible so they can be directly experienced by another person. Another way of putting this: “the good of the project is greater than the individual interests of the team members”. If this mentality isn’t shared among all team members, you have a broken team.
- A great team shares the same ambitions, and reinforces this with every action taken. In the past, I would have evaluated teams by looking at personalities, communication, mutual respect, and other such indicators of a healthy social group. Many such teams are quite pleasant to work with in a social sense, but never quite reach the heights of productivity they imagine. The key indicator may be, for teams I’m interested in working with, is the level of shared ambition.
I’ve been lucky with most of the teams I work with. There’s definitely a sense of ambition. Right now, I’m stuck in the cycle of trying to keep it all going.
References:
http://davidseah.com/2010/07/finding-ambition/
