Why Career and Team Building Are Your New “BFFs”

Keeping employees happy, engaged, and on the payroll can sometimes be challenging. Keeping up with trends takes effort. But keeping up with chaos can prove almost impossible. Yet these are real time demands every business is encountering. While all these challenges can and do crop up at any time, the recent chaos has brought about more and bigger changes in a shorter amount of time. What does this mean for career and team building and how are the two connected?

The Connection Between Teams and Careers

Team are made up of people and people need some form of motivation to engage in whatever work they might be doing. It’s true that many people have an internal motivation, others not so much. However, both types of behaviors must have an external catalyst or vehicle with which to develop, drive, and implement that motivation. This is where the connection between teams and careers comes in. When people find their work engaging, they want to build a career around it, and vice versa. People who are career builders and find their work engaging make better team members. This makes your job as a leader easier in building high performance teams.

Why The Connection Works

People who are career builders understand that to build a strong career, they need to engage in behavioral activities the non-career builders just don’t see or find worth their time. Here are a few examples:

• Keeping up with trends. Career builders and team members need to understand where their industry is heading. That matters because there may be new skills, knowledge, or techniques to learn. There may be new market directions to explore or be ready to take on before the competition knows what’s happening. Reskilling, according to Dan Schawbel writing for LinkedIn Pulse suggests, “it’s estimated that 40% of workers will require up to six months of reskilling by 2025.” Leaders cannot build high performing teams with members lacking the skills the organization needs for growth and profitability.
• Chaos or no chaos, change is inevitable. People who are career builders intentionally learn to be adaptable, even if that is not an innate attribute, for them. Adaptability carries us through minor and major changes. It helps us adapt to new opportunities. It helps high performing teams turn on a dime when necessary. Being adaptable helps people adjust to new working configurations such as hybrid work.
• Chaos can create wins and losses and so does building a career. No one achieves every goal in life or business on the first attempt. The attitude of learning from loss and disappointment is essential. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link and a team is only as strong as its weakest member. When failure and disappointment strike and people have no resiliency, your team members will fall off one-by-one and you will soon be doing the challenging work of building a new high performing team and that doesn’t happen overnight. Meanwhile, the competition is eating your lunch.

All of these are behaviors you want members of high performing teams to possess. Keeping up with trends is both a business and career 101 topic. Team members who keep up with trends can also help guide teams out of outdated technology, products, and processes that can keep a business from being successful. If you don’t have team members who can adapt to change, productivity and innovation will suffer. If team members are not resilient, emotional quotient will be nonexistent and conflict will drive any good culture into ruin.

Summary

One can picture team and career building walking into the sunset, arm in arm as new BFFs. OK, I got a little carried away, but making them YOUR new BFF and linking these two tools will help build a solid foundation for engagement, retention, high performing teams, and a strong bench.

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