By Arthur F. Carmazzi
Does a team’s impact affect an individual’s personal capacity? The answer is a clear “Yes”, so the actual question is how to make that influence one that improves performance instead of deteriorates it. If you wish to influence the dynamics behind superior team performance, you need to understand the psychology that drives human reaction. The methodology we will be discussing is the Directive Communication Organisational Development Psychology
In the beginning the caveman needed to survive. Man discovered safety in groups and the beginings of group dynam. It was a matter of necessity rather than preference. If you were not a part of a group, your chances for survival were slim. Compliance to the majority turned out to be the requirement to remain in a group and physical strength was the dominant factor for group leadership. Those who were strong and successful in the art of survival had the majority influence toward that conformity and only the strong challenged these leaders. If you challenged the leadership, you needed to be prepared to fight. And, if you suffered defeat, you were forced to leave the safety of the group and fend for yourself. There were few challengers as the risk was high and it became an ingrained survival response to achieve acceptance from the group, so people just kept quiet. It was a time of conformity!
Then it was time of significance revolution. The caveman’s brains got bigger and more developed. Individuals became torn between finding there own path and achieving there own recognition, verses conforming to the group. Physical strength was not the principal factor for influence any more. Now, people could think! Survival was no longer the acquisition of food and shelter; it had become a fight of ability. The more brilliant you were (and able to apply it), the more useful you had become. The more influence you could exert over others, the more powerful you became. We began to compete for significance trying to show others how important and able we are, and if they had faith on us, or in some cases feared us, we became even more significant. We created a civilization that needed to be right!
Then came the industrial revolution and groups evolved into teams but the fundamentals of our survival instinct, our emotional evolution and the emotions that drive us were still there, and a significant part of our psychology. Our capability to perform our best in teams depended on the way these emotional drivers and understanding the dynamics they promote.
In modern times, the caveman has evolved and the awareness of our psychology has expanded. We now look for better ways to develop our selves and our performance, but our caveman nature sometimes gets in the way. While our modern brain is influenced by numerous factors of emotional drive, the three that came from our caveman age are still key to our performance in teams:
a. The drive to belong.
b. The drive for security.
c. The drive to be significant.
As with our caveman ancestors, potential for achievement has less significance to us than our fear of loss. Loosing (or the possibility of loosing) our sense of belonging or our sense of security or importance are materialize in caveman like reactions. These reactions are sometimes subtle.
Our caveman reaction for conformity is directed by our need belong and feel secure in the group, so we keep quiet and obey. And if we do challenge, we are probably depriving others of their importance or security, causing them to react for their self-protection. This can either intensify to greater conflict, or it may revert back to compliance and conformity to stop conflict. Either way, these are still caveman reactions and are NOT productive to high performance teams.
The greatest barrier to high performance is the caveman’s reactions to loosing significance, in order for the caveman to be right, it is must for him to prove someone else wrong, and that means, more caveman reactions from the other team members! And the worst part is that reality is not what matters, the caveman reacts on emotion without fact, and so “perception” affects reaction. When someone feels wrong, they feel less capable; they may feel like they have less authority and therefore are less secure, they react with aggression or submission out of dissatisfaction, and a lesser desire to cooperate affects their performance and the entire team.
So how do we get the caveman out of our teams so we can avoid reacting and act like the evolved humans we have become, able to perform the best we can?
There are 4 stages to our evolution into “awakened” team members:
Stage 1: Acknowledge the primitive caveman in you.
Stage 2: Soothing the significant caveman.
Stage 3: Keeping the caveman away from your team.
Stage 4: Evolving into the awakened team member.
Each stage is a stage of awareness. It awakens our greater perception. But for making it effective, the entire team has to take this journey. But there are consequences, once team members have awakened, their outlook to the teams will be changed. They can never go back to the way it was and can never be satisfied with mediocrity. Each stage opens our eyes to the caveman within ourselves and others, and it lets us use the enlightened part of our brain to send this caveman back when he tries to invade our minds and body. Different team members may be at different stages in their evolution, where are you?
In the following part we will have more details on the stages of our evolution into awakened team members.
Continued in Part 2
By
Arthur F. Carmazzi, Founder of the Directive Communication Organizational Change Methodology and Ranked as one of the Global Top 10 most influential Leadership Gurus by Gurus International. Arthur specializes in psychological approaches to leadership and corporate culture transformation. He is a renowned International Speaker and bestselling author of “The 6 Dimensions of Top Achievers”, “Identity Intelligence” and “Lessons from the Monkey King”, “The Psychology of Selecting the RIGHT Employee“, and “The Colored Brain Communication Field Manual“.
More Leadership Development from Arthur Carmazzi can be found at: www.directivecommunication.com and www.carmazzi.net
