People Building

Having worked for many years in team settings (some better than others!) I’d generally learned that as a team you can make stuff happen faster, more powerfully and more magically than you can on your own.

The problem I had when I set up People Building was that I couldn’t financially afford to employ a team. There wasn’t enough money in bank-of-Gemma to fund it.

So I had two choices. Give up and walk away, or find a different way to make it happen.

Most people are aware of the cheesy TEAM acronym. Together Everyone Achieves More. It is true! Think about the speed at which a simple task can be completed if there are more hands on deck.  Suddenly putting ikea furnature together isn’t as daunting as it once was!

Your team could be the people you work with, it could be a group of friends or even your family.

The challenge is though, getting your team to understand exactly what functions, behaviours and acts you want them to do that fits in with what you have in mind. The problem is exactly as the sentence states. The ideas are in your mind, and you somehow need to transfer them into their minds, without losing any of the detail as you do so.

Here are some important things for you to remember when you are transferring information from your mind to someone elses.

1) People have different references for what might otherwise be thought of as the same experience. For example, if I say to you “red” you might think of a deep dark red like the one from your old school uniform. Someone else might think of a more pinky red because it is their favourite colour. Others might imagine a rainbow and see a multitude of colours.

If, as my team member I asked you to get me some new t-shirts for the NLP4Kids licensees and that I only wanted red ones, the red you chose might be totally different to the red I had in mind. As the communicator it is up to me to communicate to you, the kind of red I want. As the listener you can ensure you have understood by asking a clean question such as “and what kind of red is that?” This would enable me to show you or tell you in greater detail.

2) People’s state affects the way in which they hear directions. If you’ve ever been in a rush to get to somewhere and lost at the same time, you will know what I mean here. You can ask for all the clues in the world about where you are going but if you are in a panic, you miss the signs that show you the way. It is the same when directing a team. If someone is in a bad state because of a misunderstanding with you, with another team member of simply because they stubbed their toe that morning, you may find that they hear information differently to the way you intended it.

If someone has spent the day thinking “my partner is too demanding and expects me to do all the chores” and you innocently ask if they’d mind making you a coffee whilst you’re busy on the phone, they may catagorise your behaviour as the same as the behaviour of someone else that upset them earlier.

It’s important to know and understand your team so that you can ensure you have a clear insight to certain behaviours they do that give you clues about their emotional state.

3) It’s important to understand the motivations of your team. Lets say for example that you have a report that needs completing by 6pm on Thursday and you have given it to a team member who is more than capable of achieving that.

Lets also say that the team member has overspent on their credit card a little bit and they need some overtime.

In an ideal world the team member is very aware of the importance of the document being needed by 6pm on Thursday and has spoken to the boss about being able to get some overtime at some stage to raise the extra cash. In an ideal world, the boss has been very clear about the document deadline and is considering other tasks that could be worked on during overtime.

Without this communication the boss and the team member might have motivations that are not in alignment with each other.