Teams are built on humanity

To lift the team's performance, we need to elevate the humanity in our teams. Photo by Alex Kotliarskyi on Unsplash

The success of teams is a result of our humanity. The reasons that we can be greater than the sum of our parts and achieve incredible things together is a result of many of the things that make us human – like our ability to communicate, use language and to empathise with others.

Resources are things that we use to get tasks done. People are not things, they are wonderfully complex, sentient beings who, (according to behavioural economist Dr Dan Ariely) are predictably irrational.

The inherently irrational nature of humans is exactly why we can’t afford to treat our teams as a bunch of resources. Resources are consistent, mechanical and excellent at repeating prescribed tasks. Humans are irrational and idiosyncratic. The inconsistency of humans makes us poor as resources (repetitive tasks with little thinking required) and better suited to tasks where there is the need to coordinate, collaborate and overcome challenges that are not able to be solved by following a prescribed set of instructions every time.

Resources just do, but don’t think – they execute on the instructions given to them. Humans think and do – they execute on the intent and respond to the situation based on their interpretation of the scenario.

To lift the performance of our teams, we need to elevate the humanity in our teams. Treating humans as resources is a way of working that has its roots in the Industrial Revolution of the late nineteenth century and increasingly out of date in the world that we operate in.

Here are a couple of questions for you to consider this week:

1. How well does your team connect with each other as humans (not resources)?

2. Can you identify some things that make humans feel like resources?