In fact, I was all prepared to write this article based on a news story I read recently about the camaraderie and team spirit of the UT football team’s offensive line. Then, suddenly, I remembered the advice I received in 2005 from my writing coach, Tom Bird, when I wrote my book, Teaching Common Sense. Tom reminded me that my book would be categorized in the self-help genre, and that most self-help book readers are women. Women, Tom admonished me, have on average not had personal experience with team sports and are generally not going to get your sports analogies.
Poppycock! That’s what I thought when he said it. (Well, maybe not exactly that, but something like that.) I mean, it actually kind of offended me. It was as if he’d just said, “You don’t really understand women, Rhonda, since you’re not really very feminine yourself!” I was thinking, “What a sexist thing for him to say! And, if I don’t understand women, when I am one, then who does?!”
But, Tom must have been onto something, because I’ve sort of been conducting my own informal research since that time five years ago, and my findings surprised even me. Whenever I’m about to use a sports analogy, I stop and ask, “How many of you have never participated in team sports?” Sure enough, the majority of the women in the room will raise their hands!
My informal research shows that most men in the room will raise their hands as having participated in team sports. Even if it happened at a very young age, they will still identify with it. Or even if they didn’t participate in team sports, there’s a pretty good chance they served at least a few years in the military and have experienced the esprit de corps of it all—a characteristic still more likely to show up in a majority of males rather than females. So men, on average, get the “good team player” analogy. After all, it was in the previously male-dominated workplace that the metaphor of the team player became the reference point for whether a person either was or was not contributing to the group in the manner he or she should.
Now think about this for a minute. We still work in companies and organizations in which most management jobs are held by men—a full two-thirds of leadership positions—despite the fact that now more than 50% of the workforce in America is comprised of women. So here’s the great irony. All those male leaders are running around admonishing their female-dominated workforce to be good team players, when, in reality, only a minority of their employees share or understand that frame of reference! It’s become such a common cliché that, just this very day, when I was conducting a coaching call by phone, my client—a woman—said her problem with her co-worker was that he wasn’t being a “team player.” We throw around the term so commonly, and we just assume that everyone (a) has the same frame of reference, and (b) knows exactly what we mean by it. And yet, the reality is, it couldn’t be more vague or open to interpretation. Quite frankly, in the case of my coaching client, I suspect her co-worker isn’t meeting her standard for a good team player because he not only doesn’t know what it is, but he also doesn’t even know he’s not meeting it.
So, if we actually expect people to be good team players, or we actually hope to be one ourselves, do you think we might need to spend a little time getting more specific about what it means to be a good team player? The number of requests I receive to coach someone through issues with bad team players tells me we do.
I’ll be writing about this topic some more in the coming days, as we lead up to the class at the end of the month. And I promise to use at least one non-sports analogy, so please stay tuned as we work to shatter some more of our misperceptions on this concept of teams.
You can also sign up for the “free taste” tele-seminar I’m conducting on September 9, 4:00-5:00 PM, which will give you advance insight into the material contained in the class, so you can decide what’s in it for you.
Registration is open now for the following training dates:
• Knoxville, TN, UT Federal Credit Union, Friday, September 24, 8:00 AM – 12:00 PM
• Sevierville, TN, Courthouse Plaza Building, Monday, September 27, 8:00 AM – 12:00 PM
Use this link to reserve your spot today!
Knoxville Event Location Registration Link: http://collaborativeteamskillsknoxville.eventbrite.com/
Sevierville Event Location Registration Link: http://collaborativeteamskillssevierville.eventbrite.com/
Participants in Collaborative Skills for Teams training will:
- Complete a self-assessment to identify their primary and secondary team strengths based up the Team Talents™ Learning Model,
- Look at the differences between team members’ priorities and how they affect their ability to work together effectively,
- Explore how these differences can lead to miscommunication and conflict,
- Discover how these priorities affect team responsibilities such as managing time, conducting meetings, and guiding projects,
- Create an action plan for reconciling inherent differences between team members to become a strong contributor and help create engaged, collaborative teams.
Email me for group discounts or repeat attendee discount codes: rhonda@rjsleadershipcoaching.com
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