How Can Ambitious Goals Unite Teams for Success?

It's time for the first blog in 2024, and what should be the topic if not Motivation?

One of the traits that comes naturally to me is assessing people's motivations and why they decide to do or not do something.

I am simply interested in the reasons for their actions, and what inspires their idea of action. Sometimes, I witness actions in others that make me wonder where the motivation comes from.

This made me think about what motivates me and why I take action. On reflection, I realized that it's always some goal that challenges me enough to seem completely unrealistic at first: From the idea of running long kilometers to taking a risk that is completely beyond my current capabilities.

Taking responsibility to work towards goals that are bigger than ourselves builds us into individuals who will one day become capable of achieving those goals.

The thought that one day I will become the person who can achieve the goal that initially seems unrealistic is the motivator for me.

Here, I want to emphasize Challenge as a basic team component regardless of the type of organization. The job of a manager or a leader is to recognize the threshold of their people and always move just above their threshold enough to challenge them, and just below enough to not destroy their confidence.

With this kind of leadership skill, the team will always stay motivated, but something that, in my opinion, is much more important and is born in the moments when all team members have a correspondingly big challenge in front of them is The feeling of togetherness! When everyone has a big enough challenge, the team becomes one, and success is assured.

What does it mean when a team becomes one?

It is a state in which individuals in the team begin to selflessly share their knowledge and experience.

My knowledge of a certain area becomes the knowledge of my colleague. Senior experiences become the teacher of the most inexperienced colleague.

In those moments, the results are not mathematically correct, because the sum of the shared knowledge and experiences acting together is always greater than the sum of the individual ones.

photo credit: Armand Khoury