Authored By: Luke Waite

Teams are not magically fused together.

As unfortunate as this is, it is the truth. Creating unity among different people with differing backgrounds, differing work and educational experiences with differing relational experiences is not something that will just turn out the way you want it to. Rather, fusing different people together is something that takes continuous hard work, emotional labor, and intellectual integrity. Yes, the kind of hard work that leaves your head and your heart tired at the end of the day. Being a leader means that you are committed to this regardless of how you feel that day. You have committed to the team and thus you have committed to the betterment of the team above your own desires and feelings.

Good news…your team is not you.

No matter how hard you work, everyone on your team is not you and hopefully they never will be. Therefore, you cannot expect them to receive things in the way that you would. This used to drive me mad when I would be trying to bring people together and the people on my team were already determined to be against me, or so I thought. This perspective, that my team was against me, was simply not true but that was my perspective having not understood that other people interact with others completely different than I do. Initially, my response to this was to just throw up my hands and hope that they would get their heads right. You know, to essentially be clones of me. Sounds great, right? Wrong! This is the antithesis of what happened and also the antithesis of what should ever happen.

Your goal as a leader should be to bring the fullness of the people you are surrounded by out, not making clones of yourself. No, you should bring their gifts and minds out and allow them to flourish. This is not easy but it is a worthy goal and purpose as a leader.

The road to fusion is a two way street.

A leaders is responsible to intentionally choose to fuse their team together and it specifically starts with them! If a team is not fusing together, they are on the route to being torn apart. The ball is always in the court of the leader to bring teams together.

In grade school, I remember learning about the theory of kinetic energy and it was burned into my memory ever since. For those of you who were not paying attention in class that day, the theory of kinetic energy is this: things that are in motion tend to stay in motion and things not in motion tend to remain stationary. Team fusion is just the same as kinetic energy. Teams that are loose tend to continue in that zone and they need to have new motion to thrust them into being a tighter nit team.

The question the leader should be asking is how can I be part of building a good kind of kinetic energy? The answer is this, do something. Begin to put effort into your team’s collective synergy, energy, and be a positive agent of fusion. Keep that sort of energy in your team and promote whatever promotes this sort of positive energy within your team.

If this brought you value or you just have questions, please feel free to reach out. You can reach us at thelevco@gmail.com or you can find us on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram @thelevco.

Be well!