"Dream Teams" Can Be Created Within This One Critical Framework

Defining one's terms is key. So, first of all, what is a Dream Team? For this exercise, I offer you only two definitions; they are broad and deeply important:

#1: A Dream Team meets the challenges at hand and brings the bacon home to the company dependably and in huge slabs of the stuff!

#2: A Dream Team works well together both as individuals and as a team. The members works with great interpersonal support for one another, have self-awareness and a joy in what they do, and are in alignment not only with the goal but just as importantly with their personal interconnections, support and fulfillment.

If you have a Dream Team of the first type, lovely! My question to you would be this: Can you recreate it? Is this an Accidental Dream Team, an amazing gift of cohesion that created, and continues to create, the magic of the bottom line? Or is this a team that may fall apart if certain key people leave, or certain atmospheric elements are altered: the company's success as a whole taking a drop, causing people to look for work elsewhere; or a new boss, or a team that works for a certain amount of time but then drops in effectiveness without you knowing why?

What if you can't recreate this magic that has been raining happy dollars down on your celebratory parade? Or what if you don't have a Dream Team? What do we do then? Can we just create Dream Teams?

That very much depends on the base on which Dream Teams are built. And - surprise! - it's not about hard work, it's not about the right people in the right jobs, and it's not about money!

Really, Lori? Then what the heck is it about?

Have we not lived long enough to understand that the idea of "hard work" being the magic pill for success is not real? and yet we - and our corporations, our systems - continue to pound hammers on the head of that stunted nail.

The perspective we have been married to is not effective. With the advent of Covid, this truth is even more obvious! We adhere to the hard-work/push-your-employees/punish-or-praise mode, even though these methods have been proven, over and over, to do nothing at all to stop attrition, or halt dropping morale, stress-based illness and absenteeism, and have also done nothing at all to increase and stabilize bottom lines! What would be its opposite?

If the adhered-to methods are parental and mechanistic in nature, its opposite is both co-creative and humanistic.

Imagine putting human solutions first, and money second. It has been done, and many don't know that it has been done very, very successfully! More importantly, too few know that by tending to the human first, bottom lines are doubled and tripled. [Look up the story of Ray C. Anderson of Interface.]

By this I do not mean that we should quickly run a hire-and-fire sale to get "the right people" into teams. That would be a narrow and attrition-driven understanding of putting human solutions first. We have to go deeper. And the tools, practices and systems thinking exist that can help us to do so.

Does it seem confusing, this idea of putting money second? Let me give you a visual.

Imagine a car. Money is in the front seat. Intuition, imagination, wisdom, knowledge, and all the rest of the Cool Biz Kids are in the back seat. Money is going to swerve all over the road to pursue its fix: finding more money. But Money is blind and doesn't know where it is going!

Now imagine instead all the Cool Biz Kids in the driver's seat and Money in the back seat: a whole bunch of bucks in the back seat, 20's, 100's, 5's, 1's, and so on. Leave those suckers to take care of themselves, and they are going to get busy in that back seat and start multiplying to meet the demand of that indefatigable resource: human ingenuity born of deep human need!

This is, admittedly, a fanciful example, but it is correct in demonstrating the results of such a switch.

We like proof. We like data. They feel secure to us, and they do most definitely have their place and their uses. I was very unhappy with data for a long time...until I realized its exceptional place in creating insight and, of course, Dream Teams with their self-awareness, increased communication and communal work to improve all that brings quality of life and work together.

Now that we can use the data to back up both the superpower of authentic communication, insight into where human investigation needs to begin, we can be much happier "kids"!

Now we can not only reveal aspects of the humans doing the work, but also create communication among them!

Now we can not only further awareness and authenticity in communication, but we can also show them what kind of team they are - what they are most highly suited for in their present formation.

And just for some icing on the cake, now we can not only determine what kind of team they are, but we can help them see pitfalls and strengths in their relationship to their team's goals.

That is the icing on the cake because we can now put down the punishing whips and goads, and instead take up the fascinating tools of strategizing, creating, discovering. Then, open-eyed about what it will take to align those two aspects, the team and the goal, and they can go there together.

Hallelujah!

When we can create Dream Teams from any formation, we have the ability to create all that we have been seeking for so very, very long: stability, bottom line badassery, creative and disruptive ideas, a true connection to those we are serving, and a group of individuals who have the kinds of understanding relationships and co-working practices that automatically encourage them to find meaning, fulfillment, inspiration and expansion in their work. We can create, and recreate, our Dream Teams at any given time.

What a concept! What a marvelous reality!

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Lori Kirstein is a Consultant for Dream Team Building, Interpersonal Communication & Business Growth, and Women in Business. Lori is a Partner of The Predictive Index, which helps her provide tools for humanized business growth. For greater insight into her business-advancing practices and tools, schedule a conversation here: https://bit.ly/30MinuteGGG. She can be found at www.GoodbyeGoodGirl.com, and reached for information about talks and consultant services at [email protected]