When people in a workplace, starting with leadership, possess self-awareness, they are able to practice effective team building and heal negative situations, memories, and other remnants from the past in order to move forward together successfully.
Many teams hang on to hurts from the past that get in the way of practicing effective team building. Although it’s highly beneficial to heal past hurts, it’s common for leaders and teams that lack self-awareness to pretend that they don’t exist and avoid dealing with them. When you heal the past you get rid of the junk that clogs up your workplace interactions. You get a chance to hit the reset button and move in whatever direction you want with your team.
I am not recommending that your group wallows in agony and despair. Your goal is to develop self-awareness, benefit from acknowledging the past, and then move forward. If you have some issue that affects your team’s functioning today why not do something to move past it? Once you resolve it you’ll be ready to grow without having that issue holding you back in any way. Here’s how you can get started working together on putting the past behind you.
1. Think of something that happened to the team that still affects everyone to this day.
2. Acknowledge that it exists.
3. Write down how it affects each person currently.
4. How would the group be different if this issue were not in the picture?
5. What is each member of the team willing to do to move beyond the issue?
Your answers to these ideas will help you start a dialogue and create a starting point so that you can move forward without the the past weighing you down. You’ll also all work together more happily without the stuff that was holding you back.
What will you do to increase self-awareness in your workplace and build strong teams that heal the past?
Cheers,
Guy