Going through the gears for better teamwork
Transcript of this video:
I was thinking the other day of some of the challenges people have in their working relationships and found myself reminiscing about learning to drive. Just before I hit the legal age of 17, my dad took me in the family car up to an old disused airfield to learn the basics of driving, and I remember particularly struggling with the clutch.
That’s the pedal you use in a stick shift or a manual transmission car as you move between the gears. And like a lot of learner drivers, I kept on either stalling the engine or crashing the gears, and Dad got increasingly irate with me and yelled at me to use the accelerator more, which actually only made things worse.
And just as I was stuffing up the use of the clutch in the engine, so Dad and I were kind of stuffing up our relationship, where he was trying to go faster than I could go, and our relational clutch wasn’t working.
And I think in a lot of working relationships, we’re doing the equivalent of crashing the gears or stalling the engine. For example, when one of us is trying to go faster than another is ready for, or for example, when you are looking for feedback and you maybe used WhatsApp to send a message and then you keep seeing that sort of tantalizing other-person-is-typing thing, but then nothing appears and you’re left quite not knowing what to do.
And you can actually… I know, I find, I can burn up a lot of nervous energy in that kind of gap. So, the challenge of working relationships is to try and move more slowly through the gears, if you like, with each other.
Now, clutches have actually become increasingly sophisticated over the years, but they’re never gonna match the complexity and rich potential of any human relationship.
So, moving through the gears smoothly in a human relationship is gonna be more challenging than just learning a clutch. It’s going to be subtler. And I don’t think there are gonna be any simple rules for doing it. It’s about lots of practice and paying attention to detail.
And I know, in my work, I just find it incredibly satisfying when I feel like a group is getting more of that traction, one with another.
Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash
