The Power of Teaming: Building Trust and Collaboration for Success (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Remember those human skills we talked about, listening, giving and receiving feedback? You know, these are the opportunities for those skills to operate. Doesn't matter if this team is a short-term team or a long-term team. It doesn't matter, right? A team is not a group of people who work together. A team is a group of people who trust each other. And just because you were assigned to work with somebody doesn't mean you're a team yet. You have to do the hard work of building a team and creating teaming. And whether a leader is assigned or whether a leader emerges, and it doesn't matter the rank, a leader recognizes that they have a responsibility to see those around them rise. It's not about them and their glory. It's not about I did all the work, you know? And what's fascinating is a team of average performers is outperform a team of high performers every day for all of the reasons we're talking about, which is are you in service to your team or are you in service to yourself? When I used to teach way back when, I did team projects and the university advised me when, because I made the teams. I didn't let them choose. I would put my top performers on one team. I'd put my bottom performers on another team and then I'd spread out the average. Because my original instinct was to take my top performers and put one of them on each team, right? And the university said don't do that. And so I followed the university's guidance and I put all my top performers on one team. And literally as I announced the teams in the class, the rest of the class were like, come on, like I'd stack the deck. My top performers never, ever, ever got the best grade for their group projects. Never. My top performers spent more time in my office going, but I'm doing all the work and that person's not doing the work. And is it going to affect my grade? And what happens about my grade, my grade, me, me, me, me, me? The average performers, because they knew that they were middle of the pack, they worked together a hell of a lot better. And they always, every year, outperformed the top team. Every single year. Because they were devoted to their team rather than themselves. They're more concerned about each other's grades and the group grade rather than my grade. And so that's part of teaming. It's showing up for the team and service to team, not worrying about the disparities of who's doing more or less work. It doesn't matter, right? If somebody's doing less work, then brush them aside. Like, so what? They're going to get your grade. I mean, welcome to life, you know? Yeah, it's unfair. Yeah, yeah. Congratulations. Yes, it's unfair. You did all the work and they got a good grade. What do you care about them? Worry about yourself, right? And so this is what teaming is. The hard work of teaming is actually the hard work of learning to build deep meaningful relationships. And I guarantee you, if you can learn the skills to be a better listener, a better team player in your group project, you will find weird things happening in your friendships and your relationship with your parents and your siblings and your girlfriends and your boyfriends, which is, you'll notice that those relationships are getting better too, because the skills are human skills and they're transferable professionally or personally.