Teamwork
For advisors, summer is a great time to step back, examine your practice and look for opportunities for improvement. As a result of participating in a couple of events recently, the notion of teamwork has been on my mind. The first event was work-related, while the second was personal.
Towards the end of June, we organized an escape room activity in downtown Toronto. Our ad hoc team, comprising 8 colleagues who don’t typically work together, were given a scenario, locked in a room and tasked with solving a series of puzzles in order to escape. In 45 minutes. In the dark. At least we had flashlights. The puzzles had us navigating a labyrinth of logical, physical and investigative puzzles in order to find our way out. We succeeded by collaborating and working as a team, with two minutes to spare!
More recently, I took my family on a whitewater paddling excursion on a section of the Madawaska River in eastern Ontario. While our teams were small – my son and I were in one canoe, while my wife and daughter paddled the other one - we relied on the same skills to navigate the standing waves, hydraulics and pillows on the Madawaska that also helped us beat the clock in the escape room.
These skills included clear communication, knowledge of roles, trust, problem solving, support, respect, organization and constructive feedback. Before eddying out into the fast moving current, my son and I planned out our route (as well as a plan B in case something went awry), reviewed who was going to do what (tilt downstream, setting our angle of attack, draw or cross-draw, etc) and then recapped what went right and what didn’t go quite as expected once we had pulled into calmer waters. The best performing teams on the 53rd demonstrate these skills on a daily basis.
For advisors looking to add more teamwork to their practice, I’d suggest starting by crafting a document that clearly sets out roles and responsibilities for each team member, even if you just have one. Joanne Ferguson sets out a nice process for this task in her book, Best Practices: A Handbook for Advisors and Their Teams, which is available online.
Enjoy your summer.
Below is a picture of our team after our “escape” while the top photo is of my son and I navigating the Chalet rapids on the Madawaska.
