When you find a great team, we are inclined to pick out individuals within, that must be making the difference. We move those individuals out of that team to another team. The team they left breaks down, the team they join is not fired up. We end up with a lose-lose situation.
When we find a beautiful home, we ask them to act as counsellors, giving prescriptions to new couples on the dos and don’ts. What you find is that prescriptions from the beautiful homes don’t work. Because values like balance, patience, consistency, care, and courage cannot be prescribed. They must be lived.
The dynamics in a team require time to develop and trade-offs of being right for being best fit. The best teams, whether as a couple or a larger team, understand that the best way to win in the long run, is to create space for each individual to be fully expressed and for that expression to respect the boundaries of their partner(s).
When you truly see what is possible from others, you will realise you do not need to compromise their space to achieve greatness.
In the short term, it is easy to get results by expanding the space of an individual (most likely a leader) and minimising the space of the team. But in the long term, an individual cannot maximise utilisation of that space, because much of it is not well know to him/her, and the team suffers. Best to allow people own their space and use levers to accelerate their development to fully maximise the potential in each space.
“Nobody is perfect, but teams can be.”
– Osasu Oviawe