As business owners and leaders, there are the typical team (read: people) challenges you will face, and when you do, you will need to get through them and come out the other side with more resilience, productivity and happiness in your workplace.

Teams in conflict tend to miss deadlines and check boxes rather than create outcomes because they become disengaged from the purpose of the work to protect themselves. 

Teamwork isn't really teamwork unless the team actually works. 

Teamwork dominates much of the work that gets done in organizations today.

We work 50% more in collaboration than 20 years ago. Translating into employees spending roughly 80% of their workday communicating or interacting with co-workers on work-related activities.  

When you bring a group of individuals with diverse experiences, skills, and interests together to form a team, communication and relational difference can emerge. 

Some familiar stumbling blocks are lack of trust, low self-awareness, unresolved conflicts (both personal and interpersonal), lack of purpose and/or role confusion and disengagement.  Grasping the root of these challenges can be difficult for everyone involved.

 These stumbling blocks are all linked to the amount of connection people feel at work.

There is a lot of focus on emotional intelligence at work and empathy specifically. Empathy has become a bit of a buzzword in workplaces. And like any buzzword, it can have judgment applied. As in, you are, or you are not empathetic.

Empathy is not something you are or are not; it can be intentional and practiced.

Empathy is about connection. It starts with connecting to your own feelings and experiences, followed by being curious about others' feelings and experiences. Empathy comes to life when you can be present with both parties' life experiences and feelings, where they overlap and communicate from there. In Nonviolent Communication, Empathy is described as a Universal Human Need and considered core human motivators common to all people, regardless of culture or geographic location.

So, as a small business owner putting a team in place isn't enough to create the results or impact you want. The dynamic and complex nature of a team requires a culture of curiosity and commitment at the organization's heart. 

Taking the time to observe potential challenges of group dynamics and create ways to solve them before they happen is ideal. Still, things can happen very subtly or exceptionally quickly, and we don't notice them until we are in the thick of them.

What I have noticed over and over again is a tendency to fall into a dance of trying to "fix" the whole thing by negotiating or pitting priorities against each other. A dance of competitive suffering.

If you have to navigate these simultaneously common and unique situations, here is a process that I have found helpful: It is partly inspired by Steven Covey's The 3rd Alternative and concepts from Empathy Factor.

In workplace situations, there are 3 sets of needs:

Person 1 + Person 2 + needs of the business.

For long-lasting results and progress, it is essential to simultaneously meet all of the needs.

To meet all of the needs, the needs must be clear.

*In most cases, the business needs are represented by the leader. This needs to be identified; the leader is here to represent the needs of the business, not their personal needs.

The process has 4 phases:

Get Curious phase is about getting curious about individual needs of each person and the business separately. Ideally, this is done independently before coming together as a group and then shared without interruption in the group and get really clear on the needs.

Get Clear phase is where you look for the common ground and any missing pieces to ensure all needs are met. What's important here is to resist falling into comparing priorities or needs. Focus on what can be done, added or taken away to ensure all needs are met individually - remembering to keep people and business needs separate while finding the commonplace

Connect phase is a pre-scheduled time to make sure the decisions, agreements and actions decided on in the restorative phase are happening and all the needs are being met in a meaningful way.

Stay Connected - proactive sessions where time is taken to reinforce practices and evaluate what can be added, deepened, or removed from the way work is done.

If at any point something feels unclear, it is time to go back around to the curious phase and journey through the process again.  

You can use several tools or processes in all of these phases. What works will be different for each team and possibly for each situation. Some teams are more vocal processors or visual, reflective, etc. So staying open and present is an essential element of this process. Sometimes you can manage it internally, and sometimes it is helpful to have an outside perspective with someone who has extensive experience working with different teams. Having someone to hold the space and bring the resources to help you confidently  walk through these phases.

Working in a team means working with other people to achieve a common goal.

The magic and the problem of working in a team is it pulls together different talents and skills. Putting focus on emotional intelligence and empathy at work allows life-work integration which in turn builds resilience, encourages productivity and generates more happiness in our professional and personal environments.

Inspired by: 

The book Rest by Alex Soojung-kim Pang