What is Reality for your Team? How does knowing and agreeing on your reality affect your team’s ability to be effective?
In their landmark research on Extraordinary Teams, discussed in their book Extraordinary Groups, Geoffrey Bellman and Kathleen Ryan discovered that we all bring certain human needs to our group or team interactions. And while we no longer join together for simple survival or perpetuation of the species, we continue to enter into groups and teams with the hope of meeting our needs for inclusion or belonging; bonding with a sense of shared purpose and understanding our reality so we can make a difference.
Bellman and Ryan further suggest that only through understanding the current world and how it affects the group will a team be able to achieve their goals and fulfill their purpose. And they recognize that the world will differ from team to team as it is the most “immediate setting that is relevant to the group.” For your team, understanding your reality is about understanding your world (however you define it) and how it affects the team.