The next generation of work: deep performing teams.
Written by Louise Marra, co-founder of Emerge Institute.
“If we evolve the idea, you see, the planet might be more compassionate and something like heaven might dawn.” — Bill Hicks
Evolution is an impulse that applies to all life. This includes you. Your team. Your organisation. It includes the way they relate to each other and the living planet.
We can be slow to innovate. We go on thinking the way we have done things is still the way to do things. But often this is putting the past in front of us and calling it the future. To evolve as a species, which now seems vital to our survival, we must evolve how people work together. Our approach to this has been static for way too long.
My aim here is to take the concept of a high performing team, and evolved it. High performance does not serve us well enough, especially in the hands of poor drivers. We need to explore, play and build capacity for deep performing teams. These are teams that understand and can work in an effective ‘we space’.
There are vital features and competencies we can look out for and develop. Deep performing teams prioritise personal and interpersonal growth and development. They consider this essential for each person to show up as our best, clear and coherent self. These teams are dedicated to the highest calling of all team members. They maximise the shared ‘we space’ of their creativity and decision making.
Some of the features are:
A systems approach. We must be individually and collectively sensitive to the systems living and operating around us. We need to see them, hear them, feel them and work with how they want to evolve. We cannot take a systems perspective otherwise. When we operate in isolation of these systems we are insensitive and ignorant to the flow of wairua, the flow of life, as it wants to evolve through us and our teams. Does sound obscure? Esoteric? Look around at the concrete ways this insensitivity plays out in so many of our decisions.
Dedication to the growth of all. We help all work with their own evolutionary impulses, on their own trajectory. The team provides a container and network of support that is truthful, honest and open. This includes compassionate feedback and self-inquiry. This is particularly true of areas of ‘shadow’, which can be any kind of psychological or emotional energy that arises.
Current industrialised professional culture almost completely denies or represses these energies. At best they are treated as a barrier or blockage to progress that must be overcome. Deep performing teams seek to welcome, honour and integrate them. They are part of the living evolutionary process.
We all have the past to integrate, so we don’t keep living old versions of ourselves. This is a dedication to the healing journey of all, how it shows up in our organisations and teams. How we support it and all learn from it.
Dedication to the power of the ‘we space’: staying in relationship so that all is included. This means that what shows up in one person is often true for the whole or has truth for the whole. We see each person as a window into some part of the team culture. Or as intelligence that needs to be included for more energy to flow.
This means we name our shame, but don’t let it isolate us from the team. It means we speak our truth of what is happening in us, not too us. We work with the difficult as our learning edge. We clear our collective ‘living room’ as we go. We don’t let issues build up in conversations we have avoided or left incomplete.
Honours process. Our exclusive factory-like focus on inputs, outputs and outcomes is outdated. It’s a poor fit for the multiplicity, impulsivity and complexity of the flow of our human creativity. Visions and purposes are also too narrow and static, no matter how carefully crafted. They seldom fit for long.
The individuals in deep performing teams dream. They allow others to connect their dream with the dream of the whole. They stay in touch with the evolving process, rather than assume this will happen according to a set plan.
Works with polarities. We include in our work the knowns and the not knowns, visibles and invisibles, overt and covert. For example, when we get stuck, disturbed or agitated we stay with it. We include it. We know this is often where the new is born. We know that when we don’t stay with this, we go back to our comfort zones, and cannot birth the new. We don’t panic when we don’t know. We stay with the not knowing long enough for some clarity to find us. We don’t desperately try to hunt it down, or snatch at the next familiar or comforting thought.
Works to develop subtle competencies. Everyone knows the general capacities for good team work. Good communication. Strong interpersonal skills. Empathy. Listening. Understanding. Strong process. Effective strategy.
But what lies beyond? The subtle competencies. Sensing and listening with our whole bodies. Knowing when the energy in the room gets too fragmented or contracted. Pausing to release and refresh the collective nervous system. This is how we help the future land, rather than retreading more of the past. This is how we create coherency. In every moment and in any event at least one team member is grounded. They ground the team through their presence. This can be anyone in the team. It can change from moment to moment.
A balance of masculine and feminine. It is time to return to a new balance. The feminine energy is wisdom. The masculine helps it arrive into the world. We all have both.
Focusing on human being rather than human doing. This allows us to find prime acupuncture points in strategy and timing. It means we can work competently with silence, stillness and presence. This allows inspiration to download into ourselves and our teams. Without this presence we are locked into the past.
Working with our all our intelligences. We value the intelligence of the mind, emotions and the body. We work with all of them to arrive at our most effective and whole strategy. It takes training for individuals to switch these intelligences on and know how to use them. But there are simple processes to enable this.
Natural hierarchy. We work with allowing the intelligence of the system to lead through any person with the most skill or mastery at any moment. We don’t limit that to a role or allocation.
Value is added to all cycles all the time. We constantly build natural, human, and technological capital. We no longer see ourselves as a drain on people and the planet.
To do this there are fundamental practices and tools that a team needs to be dedicated to:
- Presence. Connection to and between body, emotions and mind.
- Co-presence. Connection to and between your body, emotions and mind, and those of others.
- Healing and integrating. Compassionate and patient allowing and acceptance.
- Resonance and full body listening. Understanding the two way interactions between the way we all move through the world and the way we feel.
- Digesting and harvesting all forms of learning. Including the undercurrents and the unsaid.
- Shadow practices as growth and birthing the new. Working with our fears on our learning edge.
- Feeling and working with the mauri. What life wants to arrive and arise.
- Being a strong witness. A host for self and others.
- Able to feel into the field. Working with systemic intelligence.
- Able to ground in the body and the earth. Creating a coherent collective field.
- Ability to work with everything — whether difficulty or joy. Integrating the past to expand on it.
- Enabling every team member to access the future. Build an intelligence of higher consciousness.
