Intentionally Empowering Each Other

One of the great aspects of being part of a high-performing team is how each member of the team intentionally contributes to empowering each other, which elevates both our collective process and our combined results.

Recently, some of my colleagues and I reflected on how we help each other make our highest, best contribution to our collective work.  Intentionally empowering each other starts with awareness, leverages complementarity, progresses through a desire to help, and ends in a spirit of partnership.

Awareness

Empowering one another starts with seeing and knowing each other. As you work together over time, close colleagues can develop a deep awareness of each other’s strengths and areas of expertise, as well as a sensitivity to each other’s weaknesses. Who brings what domain knowledge and what experience? Who on the team are the extroverts, the introverts, the strategists, and the detail-oriented? Who analyzes data, chases down numbers, drafts documents, follows through on the contractual nuances, builds the relationships, presents, represents, creates, edits, and speaks on behalf of the company? Ultimately, what mixture of strengths does each individual bring to the team? Intentionally seeking to discover each other is the first step in developing into a fantastic team.

The other end of awareness is becoming continuously cognizant of your startup’s stage, critical milestones, and strategies so that it is always clear who is carrying the critical path balls at any given time. Give preference and support to those who are making the most significant contribution to the team’s forward progress in each period. For a team to work this way, there must be enough common awareness and context communication to enable the team members who are organizing work to be able to determine whose time and focus needs to be protected for the overall goal accomplishment.  Team leaders need to continually invest in gathering the requisite context to make informed strategic resourcing decisions to use this lever.

Complementarity

Within the context of the startup’s overarching goals, one of the great characteristics of a high-performance team is that its members complement each other. Their strengths blend together and become more than the sum of the parts. Within that complementarity, there is the opportunity to support one another by letting each individual bring their strengths to the party.

This works especially well when you organize the work so that each member of your team supports the others such that all can focus on making their highest, best contribution. Bring complementary perspectives and skills to bear to get better results by:

• Having those who excel at crafting content from scratch collaborate with those who are great editors to expedite the production of polished new content.
  
  
• Having those who are good at planning and seeing the big picture clearly define concrete targets for those who excel at wrangling all the data and details into submission.
  
  
• Having the product owner with deep knowledge of the customer/user’s needs collaborate with the technologist who understands the range of possible implementation options to find the value inflection points that add maximum value in a robust implementation.
  
  
• Having the scientist who brings vision and analytical rigor but whose first language is not English partner with a colleague who is not as technically adept but brings strong writing skills work together to generate finished analysis more efficiently.
  

The key is to be aware of where one person’s strengths can complement another’s weaknesses. Be sure to combine these characteristics in a way that emphasizes individuals working out of their strengths and leveraging colleagues’ complementary strengths to avoid anyone working extensively out of an area of weakness whenever possible.

Desire to Help                                                                   

Within the context of the company’s objectives and strategies and an awareness of your colleagues’ capabilities and needs, we can deeply respect and value each other. From that can flow a desire to help and to make each other better.

What that looks like in any given period depends on many factors, such as who is being supported, their strengths and needs, and what the work to be done looks like.  For example, sometimes supporting a colleague looks like:

• Being the talking partner that a colleague needs to sort through the nuances and intricacies of a thorny problem
  
  
• Putting a protective bubble of minimized interruptions around the colleague who needs to do some hard work requiring deep, sustained focus
  
  
• Dividing and conquering by taking care of some aspect of the work while your colleague tackles a different part. 
  
  
• Providing a listening ear and some encouraging words when a colleague is confronting a difficult problem or setback and needs support
  
  
• Allowing the drafter to generate the core content and the editor to refine that content to make an excellent report rather than taking turns drafting and editing

That desire to help others succeed empowers the whole team to reach greater heights.

Spirit of Partnership

The bottom line is that when we know each other, are complementary, and fundamentally want to help, a virtuous cycle begins that fuels the whole team with positive energy and joy.

When colleagues intentionally support one another, that is when you feel like you are in the trenches together, as partners and teammates, rather than walking a lonely road.

I know when we have achieved that when I notice that others are encouraging me and each other, or when someone exclaims “this is so good for me” in response to someone else’s lifting hand supporting and affirming their work. 

This is when joy overflows and when that extra effort that achieves excellence feels like the only way to fly!  These are the times and seasons I treasure – and I know we have something special to offer the world when such teams come together.