Teams, Tribes, and Community - 0.3.0

The results of my fledgling efforts to step into a leadership roll for a team of high performing freelancers have greatly exceeded expectations. In fact, this experiment has become one of the corner stones to a career pivot I’ve been working on for over a year and hinting at for several months. The team’s support, encouragement, and ruthless feedback delivered with care and compassion has allowed me to re-calibrate my compass and move, once again, in a direction aligned with my mission and purpose. I’m on track for a soft launch in late July, so more on that later.

Back to the team experiment.

Having weathered several challenges - some anticipated and some surprising - outlined in the first two episodes of this adventure, the next concern weighing on my mind had to do with attrition. Each one of us are incredibly busy and, in the beginning, were spread across 17 time zones. The likelihood of the team staying together long term (i.e. six months) was an open question. I had raised the issue of adding members with the team several times. First, very early on and again after about three months. The decision each of those times was to take a wait-and-see approach. We described what the problem might look like and the signs for when we would need to address the matter of adding people to the team.

After the first of the year, we did loose a couple of members (and shrank the time zone span to nine hours), but that was it. Attendance has been surprisingly and delightfully consistent. Not everyone can attend every week, but with nine members, each week has 6-7 in attendance. This is the ideal size for 1) addressing several substantive topics each week and 2) allowing everyone on the call a chance to speak. The feeling now, after 10 months, is that the team is significantly invested in each other’s success and adding members would be too disruptive. In other words, dedication to the team and our trust in each other has become sufficiently strong enough that it has achieved a self-sustaining energy. My sense, however, is that this is a fragile energy and could be disrupted by something unexpected. So I remain vigilant to shifts in how the group is interacting.

A second challenge fits under the heading of "administrative." I received a phishing (SPAM) email that contained an attached copy of an email I had sent to the group several months prior. It contained the link to our Zoom meeting and the password. (Everyone still had to sit in the Zoom waiting room before I allowed them into the meeting, so I deemed including the link and password low risk for the short term. But that obviously just changed.) By this point we were beginning to share information that I considered intellectual property or personal in nature. To resolve this, and after an extensive but failed search for a suitable platform, I wrote a simple community site that requires authentication. Group members can manage their own account to gain access to any URLs, passwords, shared information, or private files. And since I wrote it, I can ensure that any potentially sensitive information is encrypted at rest.

A third challenge that arose in the past several months had to do with the idea of “fuel” for the group. That is, money. Since we began meeting, a couple of the team members had privately asked how they could help with some of the basic costs I was carrying for running the group. My response has been to not worry about it as costs are minimal, about $20/month, I estimated. One of the team members offered to survey the group on what they thought. Taking me out of that conversation was exactly what needed to happen. The result was a wonderful resolution.

• The team agreed to rotate facilitation responsibilities for the weekly meeting. This was happening already, for the most part. But there were a number of stretches where I was facilitating week-to-week. This was a time "expense" for me as preparing for each week was something I took to heart and felt I wasn't always succeeding at doing well with this group. The benefit of shared facilitation is that alternative approaches are introduced and this group has brought many wonderful challenges to the weekly meeting.

• The process helped me clarify my thinking on the monetary costs. Before even offering to bring this group together, I'd decided the costs would be my contribution as long as they remained below something like $100/month. They never came close to that number and as I develop my business, these costs will diminish or vanish as the cost of collaboration tools, like Miro or my file server, will be covered by customers and clients. More importantly, the introduction of this type of transaction, in my view, would introduce a disruption to the self-sustaining cohesive energy I mentioned earlier. I don't want that.

So what's the source of our self-sustaining cohesive energy? A few things seem key:

1. Each of us shows up every week. Vacations and conflicting client meetings are occasional exceptions, but even when traveling, efforts are made to connect while on the road. Sometimes from surprising locations. We are all comfortable joining as digital nomads or from a fixed location.

2. Everyone on the team works to add value to the weekly meetings. There are no freeloaders among these freelancers. We help each other and, over time, are in turn helped in significant ways by others.

3. We've come to know each other personally. In several cases, we've been able to meet in person. As a result, trust has strengthened and the level of problem solving has gone to deeper levels as the willingness to expose vulnerabilities has increased. This has made our conversations much more meaningful.

4. We recognize our diversity and the value it brings to the conversation. The facets to our diversity are many: Location (9 time zones), culture (9 countries/nationalities), gender, political and religious beliefs, age, and interests. Our undefined etiquette seems to be that rather than fighting to defend boundaries, we seek to cross them and explore.

I still take none of this for granted and remain attentive to what I can do (or not do) to keep the dynamics of this group healthy and strong.

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Photo by "My Life Through A Lens" on Unsplash