Part of your plan to make more money is to lead and manage others.
Gelling, coming together, and the unique notion of Swing need to become tools in your bag.
Why is getting to a “Swing” state so hard and why do we long for it?
Quick, think of the best team you were ever on? Now think about the next group of teams that you were on that were also amazing? Take those two groups, add them together and now divide them into the total number of teams you have been on since you were five. Chances are your percentage of great teams is less than 10%. Now don’t feel bad about it, this doesn’t make you not a “team player”, rather it speaks to just how frequently we are on teams and how hard it is to get into a “Swing” state.
It turns out that getting into a Swing state with others is not only rare, it is also valuable. Time and again history points out to us that hard fought victories on battlefields, cures to vicious diseases, and yes even youth sports championships are the result of teams working in seamless synchronicity. The millions of pages devoted to the accomplishments of these teams litter our libraries with their praise. Yet who among us has the true recipe that will work every time, and why have so many of our team experiences been lessons of patience and resiliency?
One enemy to Swing that we have identified is a differing level of time commitment to the team. Another is the communication challenges that exist within teams based upon personality traits. Now with globalization, culture clashes. We also believe that the length of time the team is together will also have a great impact on its ability to gel. We have personally been on a relay team that was crossing the Maui Channel that was supposed to take only four hours. Being a team was supposed to be easy, but things changed in a hurry when a 15 foot Tiger Shark was spotted less than a 1000 yards from our boat!
A solution we think you might consider is addressed by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha in their book “The Alliance”. They have a simple approach to building your organization in the midst of these team headwinds that we think is relevant for today’s ever mobile workforce.
