Team Building Unity: The “A” in Team is for Appreciation

While a team project can be extremely complicated, team building unity can be as simple as making each member feel appreciated for their contribution to a project.

Team building unity is a word picture of a group of people who are joined together on purpose for a purpose. They’re pulling together to stay together, instead of straining to break free from the group. The project may draw them together, but the glue that binds them to each other is a genuine appreciation for each other.

Most workers feel that they have to justify their existence at work – earning the right to occupy the workspace to which they’ve been assigned. Appreciative leadership acknowledges that they’re not just taking up space, but that they’re actually adding value to the space, to the work environment, and to the team effort.

Appreciative leadership looks for reasons to include each team member instead of scheming to exclude, ostracize, alienate, and discourage them. It identifies weaknesses as opportunities for professional grooming and personal growth. It is just as people-centric as it is bottom line-focused.

This leadership model fuels team building unity by confirming and affirming the team as a whole. And it challenges each member to be their best for the sake of the team. It sparks inspiration and it rewards innovation. Paradoxically, it nurtures individualistic out-of-the-box thinkers while drawing them into the dynamic of group-think.

Every person is an accumulation of their experiences. From childhood to adulthood, they are informed and reformed by their background, relationships, interactions, and reactions to the people within their sphere of contact and influence. For better or worse, this collection of assorted events is a compilation of their life history. The workplace can either negate most, if not all, of this history or it can embrace it and use it – all of it: the good and the challenging; appreciating that all experiences have something to teach us if we’re willing to learn. Leaders who look to benefit from their subordinates and all that they have to offer, can identify and use these life lessons.

Like the real estate upon which their office is built, leaders who acknowledge their worker’s contribution to a project make that worker increase or appreciate in value to the team. That is, his value to the team increases as his presence and his input are validated. Team building unity boosts value which boosts production and performance. It’s at the core of the “circle of life” in a nurturing work environment.