A corporation is very fortunate, more so, very blessed, when one or more of its teams is a metanoic team.
Metanoic teams are the leaders of innovation, change, and, in short, of progress. Yet, metanoic teams are almost always invisible within the company itself. They are part of a company, even drivers of the future health of a company, but almost always tolerated or even overlooked. Metanoic teams can be a major inconvenience to management when they break rules, dislocate proverbial corporate noses, and otherwise cause other headaches for supervisors. They are frequently viewed as a nuisance. That is, an annoyance until they create or reveal what often amounts to a breakthrough. Despite the hassles of supervising metanoic teams, they are a good thing, a healthy component to any company.
For knowledge workers, there is no more exilerating, inspiring, rewarding work environment than to be working within a metanoic team.
Here’s how to discover a metanoic team that may be somewhat concealed within your corporation:
- Team work relationships are jovial
- Members are enthusiastic and often described as passionate about their task or the team objective
- You can almost feel the chemistry of the person when engaging them in discussion about their work experience or goals. Often characterizations of those people include words such as “energized”
- You can almost see the glimmer in their eyes, the excitement they get from the job and team
- Members don’t aim at satisfying stakeholders’ or customers’ needs as if it is a line item or a check box. They treat those needs as sacrosanct, as a life’s mission to not only meet them but to far-exceed them
- Every member on the team considers the goal or objective to be “do-or-die”. None of the team member think of any possibility of failing
- Team members will state they feel challenged, stretched, under terribly high pressures, but never exhausted or burned out. It’s as if the pressures become their batteries and as if their batteries are recharged by the pressures
- Stories abound. Stories about small accomplishments, breakthroughs along the way, clever negotiations, unexpected events. Sad stories. Happy stories, Humorous stories.
- You realize the people on the team, the entire team itself, is having a wild and grand adventure and you were not invited along for the ride
- You will find it difficult to pin the rose on any one person. Every job and every responsibility seems to belong to every team member
- Each person makes huge sacrifices to help the team succeed. People stay late, come in early, work weekends. All that, on a voluntary basis, willingly and with great commitment to the “cause”. They willingly sleep on company floors to be present when problems arise, etc.
- When even the smallest goals are achieved, the company rocks from the excited cheers of the team. They self-organize into celebrating their accomplishments and spontaneously do so, sometimes for even tiny accomplishments
- No team member has any doubt about the being able to achieve the team’s goals. Everyone is convinced the goals are achievable and they are on a mission to prove it
