Category Archives: Business

Creating team spirit of success under stressful conditions

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A few years ago, the football team of my son, age 9 at that time played against Ajax. I was not the coach. At the break the score was 3:0 for Ajax. I spoke with the coach, and told him that the team do not trust that they can win. He answered: Ajax pick their players from 4000 kids, I pick them from maximum 20. I asked his permission to talk to the kids. He was open and caring, and allowed me to talk to them during this break. The game ended 3:3.

After my speech with them they were fighting and went for the win. They did it.

Imagine a military unit that lost 14 out of 40 people in one blast, in enemy area, and look devastated. Agreeing to this reality, could mean my death too.

Both realities are actually the same reality, with different application.

A few points should be trained and delivered:

  • The difference between winners and losers is never the result, but the spirit. Winners will transform every result to a growth and drive moment, while losers will only torture themselves.
  • Forgiving is an expression of guilt. Meaning – we have made mistakes that were not supposed to be done. Will this attitude reset the reality to where it was?
  • We need to get them involved in shifting the reality into the desired reality. Forgiving will not get that attitude. The way to do so is to relate together to the following questions:
    • What are the results that I call mistakes?
    • What was my intention? (By values and results)
    • What were the actions that I took?
    • What did I miss?
    • What are the opportunities evolving from these results?
    • What do I need to correct? (if there is a correction needed)

This spirit needs to be trained and coached at any time and any result. This is not a trick of one time. It can be done in every break and end of a game or competition. Unfortunately, some answers to coaching and trainership can be delivered only through real-practice and not over this platform.

How to create a team

teamspiritHow can we create fast, effective and reliable processes of inspiring leadership and team-spirit?

I used to be a military deputy-commander in a highly-influential command unit. In response to high tension demanding culture, I created an inspirational leadership process that improved significantly our ability to perform effectively under stressful conditions.

Our ‘traditional-routine’ for our reserve service officers unit, would take us almost 3 days to get into high performance effective mode. At that specific situation, I invented a different process that succeeded to get everyone tuned, and in high quality performance in 3 hours.

The differences were in the attitude and communication tools I introduced into our unit. The steps were:

1) Create partnership through declaration of the mutual successes and mistakes beyond ranks
and formal authorities.

2) Ask every member to bring forward honesty and openness to learn from each other mistakes
and successes.

3) Define clearly the indications of success of the unit and the individuals.

4) Ask everyone to relate to what is not working in their areas of responsibility and in the
coordination with others, starting from the lower ranks to the higher ranks.

5) Ask everyone to come up with suggestions for these issues. Those suggestions had to be
practical and easy to apply in short term.

6) Ask everyone to relate to the processes that were working so everyone could learn and apply
in all units.

7) Ask for commitment of mutual enrichment through the processes, and define event-line for
next enrichments.

For applying such a process there is a need for short and simple preparations, including the steps that are mentioned above, plus a plan how to maintain it.

All these processes were used later in variety of all kinds of organizations, and they appeared to be contributing to fast, effective and reliable inspiring leadership and team-spirit.

In common organizations such a process will happen only after significant troubles. The key was to create trusted safe partnership, with simple communication tools. We – the leaders, had the courage to create this different process, as we trusted ourselves and our leadership. We created safety to win with us. It demanded from us to share our mistakes as much as our successes, and thus created the wanted partnership.