The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. So said Aristotle.

The past 2 weeks, as I worked out of our London office and met people in the team, a lot of them for the first time, these old words rang true.

It’s been a deeply interesting subject for me for sometime now. How does a team click together? How does it become a high performing one? How do you maintain the bar you set and raise it higher?

It’s been equally fascinating to also understand why some of these things work and some don’t. The answers or observations can be quite different, depending on what perspective one employs.

What’s true however is there are some specific tenets which propel or hinder us on these fronts.

Trust is a big one. If there’s trust between people who are on the team and they believe in each other, progress is easy and performance dramatically improves as a byproduct. Lack of trust destroys and inhibits members, pushing the team further down the rabbit hole. I have seen this firsthand and experienced both sides of the coin and I must say, trust is the no. 1 thing to establish.

Respect is another. If the members cannot respect one another and their leader, the team won’t go anywhere. If on the other hand, there’s respect, even the most difficult situations can be navigated with ease. Again, something that I have had the good luck to experience and learn from first hand.

The other natural one is competency. If people on the team aren’t competent enough, do what you may but the team won’t be able to scale up and perform. This is also the most tricky as we tend to define competence narrowly and test it within specific sub-contexts only.

While these 3 tenets are basic and critical to team success, there may be more I am not covering here which are crucial. What’s important though is for us to understand that a lot of times we overlook them.

In our quest to prove ourselves the best or just to ensure we are doing enough to keep our place, often times we compromise on these building blocks and end up experiencing sub-par team dynamics.

It isn’t our fault. This is natural human tendency. We lean toward it unknowingly, trying to protect our individualistic interests.

But what we could do to get out of this trap, is to remember that we are doing well or being shown in good light because of the cohesion we or other members have within the team. It is because of them that we are able to move seamlessly and achieve what we set out for.

Keeping our ego and individual interests aside, working with others to build trust, respect, and competence. To enrich ourselves and the experience we gain from being in the team.

For above all, the foremost reason for being in the team is to be able to contribute and grow together, learning from others! Great teams do this at a collective as well as an individual level…