Teamwork

Humbleness, altruism, trust, sincerity, getting the void as an occasion to grow, learn, spread positive thoughts of empathy, avoiding judgements, creating communion, building sane boundaries, respecting others’ boundaries, avoiding exploiting weaknesses, not letting be exploited, friendliness, informality, respecting seniority, supporting juniors, if needed: taking on others’ responsibilities, love.

These are some aspects of sane teamwork that we can transpose in every aspect of our society and, going up further, of our world. If we live accordingly to these principles we have better teams, companies, societies and nations.

But people insist to bring to the team selfishness, arrogance, lies, divisive thoughts of unempathy, untrust, flattering seniors, bossing juniors, avoiding putting ourselves in others’ shoes, exploiting weaknesses, inability to build sane boundaries, breaking others’ boundaries, fearing the void and not getting it as an occasion to grow, too much formality, obsession for hierarchies, hate.

These are aspects of insane teamwork that we, often, transpose in many aspects of our society and in our entire world.

It’s difficult to find an environment that lives by sane principles of teamwork. So if you haven’t yet found one, try to transform yours, build one new or look for one.

As for the world, if we build teams made of trusted people that trust each other we will create a sane world that lives accordingly to sane principles of teamwork.

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Teamwork

There are people that think that developing is a standalone job and every developer should figure out everything on their own. But, from my point of view, these people miss an important part of a developer’s job: teamwork. In fact, when you experience real and inclusive teamwork what you learn is that teamwork is made up of continuous debating that leads to learning a lot from each other every day.

Besides, there are many other aspects we should consider and learn when we come to teamwork:

First, succeeding to be kind is always a good achievement and it’s not easy at all, but human relationships are very important inside teams and the price to pay for a rude contact is to ruin such kinds of relationships. Besides, there are people that say that speaking the truth can ruin relationships, but this is not totally correct. The fact is that it depends on the way you say the truth. Many times, what we lack is the ability to speak and truth (a to be assertive) in a clear and respectful way. Instead often when we come to speak the truth we became nervous and so we appear unrespectful. This is an important skill that should be learned.

Second (but related to the first point), the ability to succeed inside a team lies in the ability to build strong and deep connections and relationships. And in order to reach such a goal, we need to communicate. Speaking could be a good means to communicate but it’s not the only one. What we really need in order to communicate (even though it could seem unrelated) is a sincere desire to contribute to the general wellness of the person, company, community, or institution we want to connect with. And in order to achieve such a goal we need to engage in a personal development path.

At last but not least, surely teams where we land are not perfect, surely they could have a lot of flames but we should think we’re not helpless. We can give a great contribution to improving the team. I know, it’s not easy but what a team needs is dreamers and people with purpose, and if you are one of them even though you could encounter a lot of issues (they could be fixed with patience, humility, and kindness) you will succeed. On the rest, every single step, even if the smallest, is however a step towards improvement.

However, we should keep in mind, that if the team doesn’t fit with us, we could leave and find another team that better fits with us. We should have always cleared our purpose and checked them against the team’s purpose but this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t give our contribution to the team we are now.

Teams are made of people, and people are, in the last instance, what we should care about.