Reviewing our Org Code — Principle #2: teams over individuals
Background
As an organisation, we are collaboratively reviewing our Organisational Code (org code). We are taking one principle at a time down from the shelf and discussing whether it serves us, how well we ‘live’ the principle and what we could do as a team to embed it further in our day-to-day.
What is our Org code and why do we have one?
Our Organisational Code takes a principle-based approach to outline what we value...
These principles reflect our shared expectations of ourselves and each team member. They reflect what we all agree is important and provide a point of reference to return to when needed.
Our Organisational Code describes how we enact our values.
Each principle guides our attitudes, interactions and practices that we apply to how we do our work, communicate with each other, and serve our clients.
Our organisational Code is intended to evolve as our organisation grows and diversifies, and as we learn more about how to better work together and deliver on our mission.
We see our Organisational Code as aspirational — we will always be able to get better at applying these principles to how we do things.
In a recent Beacon all-hands-meeting, we reviewed the second principle of our Org Code:
Teams over individuals: we value delivering ‘the work’ in teams. All of our people, when working together and within the right environment, can achieve greater things together than individually.
What was discussed
To guide a meaningful conversation the team was provided with two simple prompts:
How does this value resonate with you?
What needs to happen for us to further bed down this principle?
How does this value resonate with you?
It is safe to say, the ‘teams over individuals’ mantra resonated strongly with all of our team members. We heard from our people that taking a ‘teams over individuals’ approach:
makes the best use of our collective skillset — by working as a team we can maximise the utilisation of our complementary skills and achieve more together than we can by ourselves (we don’t all need to be experts!).
connects our everyday work with a bigger purpose — delivering work individually can be a ‘good’ test to see what we are capable of but working together helps us see the bigger picture and feel as though we are contributing to much more.
promotes shared accountability — when we work as a team we shift the load and responsibility from one person to many. Working together to achieve shared objectives makes you more accountable which is a good place to be.
allows access to informal learning and development opportunities — when we work as a team we open opportunities to learn from each other. Yes, structured training and development opportunities are great but there is nothing like learning from your peers.
results in better ideas and higher quality work — working collaboratively produces work that has been pressure tested, considers multiple perspectives and leverages our collective experience and knowledge.
makes work enjoyable — working in a team environment is just generally more enjoyable, period. It allows us to interact with other like-minded folks, celebrate wins (big and small) and experience greater satisfaction in the workplace.
What needs to happen for us to further bed down this principle?
The essence and motivation to take a “teams over individuals” approach is alive and well. Like all things, we still have some work to do in figuring out how we can design our work environment in a way that promotes effective teaming, but some things we have started to do, include:
Holding knowledge-sharing sessions led by our team members.
Creation of a directory of top skills our people have and can help others with.
Hosting brown bag lunchtime learning sessions.
There are times when:
we struggle to come together at the right time to workshop and document everyone's thoughts on how we tackle a new project.
we come together to workshop and brainstorm ideas where we struggle to move from generating a lot of information to making a decision on where to start.
we come together and struggle with collaboratively prioritising what to work on.
we get to the final hurdle of a project (usually a lengthy report or presentation) and can’t quite figure out how to team up efficiently to review and refine the final product.
we can’t quite figure out how to brief our peers and ask for advice in a way that is respectful of their time and yields a meaningful response.
Is there a quick answer to any of the points above? Probably not. The answer likely lies in continuing to build shared knowledge, developing shared language and codifying our ways of working so we can collaborate better.
We can also look to other settings to draw inspiration from — elite sports teams. Elite sports teams practice, have positions, seek mastery, reflect on what's working and what isn’t and have a purpose/vision for what they want to achieve collectively.
You don’t have to be a sports fan to appreciate the parallels between a sporting team environment and a professional team environment. The more we spend time together, the more we document our ways of working, the more we deliver against what is expected of us and the more we review and refine our approach the better our collaboration will be.
