Patrick Smyth

The Power of a Team

A man was walking along a road and he came to the beginning of a steep hill. At the bottom of the hill was a farmer with a heavily loaded wagon. A tiny donkey was hitched up to the yoke in front of the cart. The man asked the farmer how he could possibly expect that little donkey to pull that huge load up the hill. The farmer replied by yelling out, “Pull Benny, pull!”, and then “Pull, Jackie, pull!”, and finally “Pull Amos, pull!” Confused, the man asked the farmer why he had just called his donkey three different names. The farmer told him that the donkey was blind. He said that if he thought there were two other donkeys pulling alongside him he pulled a lot harder. That’s how he got the little donkey to pull the wagon up the hill.

Why would the donkey pull harder when he thinks he has a team working with him? Is it because he feels more confident that the team will be able to get the job done than he would have on his own? Simply knowing that others are supporting you in your endeavor can be a huge motivating and encouraging force. This force will put wind in your sails that help you to sail right on passed the all of the doubts that come along and challenge your confidence. Challenges like the huge pile of work, the complexity of the job, the breadth and depth of knowledge required, your own inexperience, and on and on. Imagine a team supporting you with all of those issues. You’re likely to immediately feel more confident that you can execute and overcome all of these issues.

Accountability is another key dimension of team motivation. Individuals sometimes feel more accountable to other people than they do to themselves. How many people do you know that go to a fitness club or gym to work out because there are trainers and other exercisers who hold them accountable for their progress? If you believe that other people have made a commitment to support you, you are inclined to want to prove to them that their trust and confidence are well vested in you. This is like an inflation proofing mechanism. Say your confidence is challenged and you look around at your supporters and they are all cheering you on, or waiting expectantly for the next thing you’re going to do, or even rolling up their sleeves and pitching in to help. You’re more likely to buckle down and get on with it despite the obstacles. You’ll pull harder, just like the farmer’s donkey. As Vince Lombardi said, “Individual commitment to a group effort -- that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work”. Even if the responsibility for your work or project is yours alone, having a team of supports allows you to make a commitment to it as though it were a group effort.

Another key aspect of having a team, and my personal favorite, is diversity. It doesn’t matter whether you are the leader of a large enterprise organization or a sole proprietor of a small home based business. If your business depends exclusively on your own brainpower for everything you do, you are severely limiting your capacity. No matter how smart you are, you simply cannot out think a team in all the aspects of a complex business undertaking. Don’t underestimate the value of any insight you can get from the most unlikely sources either. I regularly share new business ideas with my seventeen year old son. I’m always impressed by the level of understanding and the insights and creativity he is able to apply to things you might think he knows nothing about. Each of us has people around us that would be equally willing to share their thoughts and ideas if we were more willing to be open to receiving them.

People at the lowest levels in an organization often have a clearer understanding on a specific issue. Their perspective is not clouded with everything else that needs to be done in the company. Sometimes the solution is simpler than we think it might be. Humans have a tendency to complicate things. If we don’t understand them, it must be because they are very complicated and so we assume we need to engineer complex solutions. Sometimes our ego gets in the way. We shy away of asking other people for their thoughts and ideas because we don’t want to appear vulnerable and not totally in control of everything. The person who values input from a diverse range of people, listens to them, and uses that input to make wise and sound decisions is indeed more in control of their destiny than one who believes they need to do it all by themselves. As Stephen Covey put it, “Strength lies in differences, not in similarities”.

In a large corporation, you have lots of peers and subordinates to help you think things through and to provide creative ideas and solutions to problems. Entrepreneurs who don’t have this built in resource need to reach out and find people who they see as advisors in some form or the other. The relationship could be formal, as in a board member role, or it could be casual and built on a loose arrangement with a diverse range of individuals. The relationship can even include family members and other social peers. A hundred diverse ideas will beat twenty of your own any day of the week. Those are goods odds. Why would you bet against them? As a team, you will pull harder, think smarter, and dramatically increase the odds of success in your favor.