“Interdependence is a choice only independent people can make.” Stephen Covey
We all work in teams. Whether the team dynamic is flat (where everyone has the same level of authority, responsibility and accountability) or if it is hierarchical (with clear supervisory levels recognised by all involved), each party has a role to play within the team that affects its success. If one or more team members fail to perform, the success level is commensurate with that person’s or persons’ weaknesses. Fact.
Routinely, such weaknesses are initially ironed out during a training/mentorship phase, but this is usually (though not solely) focused on technical skills. But there is at least one other ‘skill’ that needs attention during the mentorship phase, and that is attitudinal.
As Covey puts it, the three elements of any habit are the what/why to do, the how to do, and the want to do. The first is often self-evident – the team knows why it has to do what it is doing. The second is the technical element, and the third is attitudinal.
That factor is really helped by acknowledging that the individual has to independently realise (through role-modelling and the adoption of appropriate values) that their attitude affects performance; the team’s, and their own.
You can’t have someone else’s great attitude for them.
That is the key to Covey’s statement, as outlined at the top of the page. Once the individual recognises, accepts, is trained for and wants to contribute – which requires independence.
Dependence is what the newbie has when they arrive. They have to be taught, shown and tempered on the how tos of their role in the team. That way they become able to work with less and less supervision, but that supervision must remain if their attitude isn’t appropriate. If they don’t want to perform, they have to be forced to do so, and this requires micro-management – which is never desirable and wastes a lot of otherwise productive time on the part of that mentor.
But once the individual is truly independent, they can be relied upon to perform, and to contribute much more effectively.
Most organisations have a structure for training which is based around this idea, but I wonder how many do it in a truly conscious fashion?
Or – get this – how many organisations TEACH the idea of dependence becoming independence, and how that independence creates inter-dependence, where the team gels and performs almost without conscious thought?
Many years ago, I was a proud member of a shift which was truly interdependent. If something happened, we just moved as a team towards dealing with it. Everyone knew their part and what they could contribute. On one occasion, on hearing us do that on a 999 call, the Control Room Inspector had to tell our (new) sergeant to leave us alone to get on with it! On another occasion a different sergeant, on hearing our team ‘get on with it’, asked politely over the air if he could have a say in what we were doing.
A truly great team contains a group of people all moving towards a common goal, using their own strengths towards the greater, interdependent good.
But it all starts with becoming independent, and having the want-to attitude.
Police Time Management 