Teamwork in Motion

According to Marcus Buckingham, everybody is looking for the best work day of their life. Will it be tomorrow? Next month? Some small number of us get a day like that quite often. Marcus would say we're well-matched with our work. The work utilizes our strengths. In addition, the work doesn't force us to spend almost all our time doing stuff we dislike. We encourage people to read Marcus' book "Now Discover Your Strengths."

While sounding like a recipe for Utopia, Buckingham says Strengths-Based Teams result in competitive advantage and increased profits. Buckingham's work offers lots of well-researched examples - where a whole team of people are working in their strengths areas. This is rare, but a valuable goal for most of us to stretch toward. Oftentimes it is the most profitable franchise in a car-rental chain, or the ultra-successful sales team. It is more satisfying for everyone involved, and generally more profitable and effective for the organization.

VidTeams wants to point organizations in that direction. We've chosen a creative forum in which to do that - making videos. We want to put people into their strengths area and get creative. No-one is assigned to a role on a VidTeam. They choose their own role. When they choose the right role they can more easily focus on it. Dream of it. Long for it. Strive for it. Let's catalyze that approach for your organization too!

"When you reach for the stars, at least you're less likely to end up with a fist full of mud." - Leo Burnett

Having said that, yes, teams get stale. Teams get used to routines, and sometimes relationships sour. So re-building and re-kindling the team spirit may need continuous process. Getting the team out of the daily routine to attack a project creatively can be an effective tool. We believe your resulting video is a record of how that happened.

We're looking for the Learning Community to evolve some ideas on the next steps.