Esprit de Corps: My Life, in Teams
How Teams Shaped My Personal and Professional Development
Post #18 of #20: I am reflecting on twenty years of personal and professional experiences in Birmingham and beyond. Visit www.medium.com/HonestlyEd to read the full #20For20 series.
As I reflect on my personal and professional development I can’t help but think about the effect tight-knit teams have had on my life. For the purpose of this post I am defining teams as groups with whom I have had deep, immersive experiences. Some of those experiences were brief as seven days others have evolved over many years.
They changed my life. Most for the better, but some had high drama attached to stinging lessons learned. I truly believe one’s role or title on teams is less consequential than our relationship to other team members. I recall out-of-body experiences where a team was so in sync we hardly need to vocalize anything. We were just right where we needed to be and when we needed to be and it just worked. Whether dumb luck or experienced leadership — things came together. Other experiences where I thought things would be much better, even with a seemingly conspicuous set of ready made factors the team just couldn’t quite get right. Those situations were incredibly frustrating, to say the least.
