From the course: Teamwork Foundations

Forgiveness and carrying baggage

From the course: Teamwork Foundations

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Forgiveness and carrying baggage

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- Your final responsibility to your teammates is to forgive them when they underperform. Nobody's perfect, and mistakes will happen, especially if people are pushing themselves and taking risks in order to strive to be great. So the thing is to realize that mistakes happen. It's not personal. Conflicts and problems can happen because people's personalities vary. And it's also because time is often short and communication's the first thing that gets reduced, when, of course, it's one of the most important. Maybe they didn't tell you about some part of the plan. Maybe you got left out. Maybe a decision was made when you weren't there. Maybe they weren't very diplomatic about telling you that your idea wasn't very good. These things will happen. And a good team player will let them go. Dragging around emotional baggage just slows you down. So as long as you can feel that what happened to you is just chance, and it's not going to be a habit, or that the process is being improved for next time, then you can let it go. If you really do feel unhappy about something, or you feel that it might be repeated, then it's fine to say how you feel and check that a system is now in place to prevent a repeat. But generally, if it's probably just a one-off and there were genuine reasons why it happened, it's best to just let it go. We all have a certain amount of personal baggage from our history, from the stuff that's upset us in the past where we didn't get closure, but this shouldn't affect the team. So maybe think about is the issue really with you and your personal baggage rather than a real problem with the team? Tell yourself that the best result for the team is to keep everyone positive rather than dwelling on small imperfections. In fact, the main person who suffers is the person carrying the baggage around, which is you. So I'd like you to ask yourself what has irritated you in teams recently, and whether it might actually feel good to forgive that person or forgive the team as a whole and move on?

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