I work with wellbeing because it’s the starting point for a good life — working life, leisure life, love life and family life. A team can be really well trained, have the most advanced equipment available, and work by the best methods in the world — but if they don’t thrive, they still won’t reach their goal.
People die from not thriving
We find plenty of examples of this in the health service. Here, around 5,000 Danes die every year from so-called adverse events. These are errors that arise, for the most part, as a result of a lack of teamwork, communication and happiness at work — or, in other words, of people not thriving. They are rarely outright failures, but the adverse events happen, for example, when a nurse forgets to switch a heart machine back on after a battery change, or when the on-call doctor fails to pass an important message on to their replacement.
The time you never forget
There are, of course, also plenty of examples of teams that really thrive and create great results. I often meet employees and managers who passionately describe how they were once part of a team where everything just worked. The stories always contain the same challenges every other team faces — but where the people involved found each other anyway, despite too little time, too few hands and a lack of money, and where the team solved the problem.
They describe how they then found strengths in each other’s differences, showed trusting behaviour by not checking each other’s work, and invented methods, techniques, tools and processes to solve the challenges. This period of their careers, they never forget.
Examples of behaviour where we no longer look after each other
- We see each other as problems.
- We don’t talk to each other, but about each other.
- We draw a line between us and them — today and back then.
A piece of good advice
If your team isn’t thriving, it’s crucial to think about what you yourself can do to start a positive spiral. Make a list of all the small things you’d like the team to do for you. If there are 10 points, that’s fine, and if you end up with 30, that’s even better. Then start doing for the team what you wrote on your list — and do it without keeping score of what you get back. Once you’ve succeeded in the mission, the rule of thumb is that you should double your effort.
Inspiration to get started
- Say good morning all the way round — every day!
- Invite a new colleague to lunch.
- Surprise someone with a cup of coffee + a little “something on the side”.
Think about your relationship. It’s rarely the gift itself that makes the difference, but your effort to please your partner that matters. So if you’re the one who’s always busy, it will make an extra-big difference if you, say, remember the colleague with a sweet tooth when you’re standing by the sweet shelves in the supermarket.
Simple ideas are easy to understand.
Ideas that are easy to understand get repeated.
Ideas that get repeated change the world.
/Martin
