Recently we had a fantastic opportunity to improve our health and hone our team skills at the same time.  Our employer, Fiserv sponsored a fitness competition called "FiservFit".  As part of the competition, employees formed teams of 4 (nearly 1000 teams globally) and competed against other teams to log the most number of steps (Fiserv also provided the pedometers to all participants)

At the start of the competition, we had no idea what a wonderful experience the 8-week period would turn out to be.  We formed team "FastPace" with 4 moderately motivated and utterly non-athletic colleagues!  As the weeks progressed though, we learned tons of lessons in team building and leadership. 

In hindsight, here is a list of things that helped us finish this journey successfully together:

• Do everything together: Of the 3.1 million steps we logged as a team, we walked more than 60% of those steps together, while adjusting to each other’s schedules and motivating each other in the process.  If we hadn’t done that, we would have not even reached the 50th percentile, let alone 95th percentile.
• Sacrifice a little on the personal-level to reap rich rewards as a team: One of our team members had tight family obligations on weekends and after-work-hours.  So, the rest of us adjusted our schedules to walk together early on Saturday mornings.  (I never woke up before 7am in my life, but for 8 straight Saturdays, I woke up by 5:30am so I could join the other teammates by 6:30!)
• Do not judge/undermine other team members:  We quickly realized not all of us had the same threshold or capacity to walk longer/faster.  However, we silently made a pact not to judge those individuals or undermine their contributions.  We slowed down for them or just went out for longer walks when those team members did not join in.
• Challenge smartly and realistically:
• We challenged each to beat the step counts at the individual level…. "if anyone on the team can beat my step count this week, that person will get a surprise gift!".  Although no one took this too seriously, we nevertheless had a healthy competition that week as everyone stretched themselves just for the bragging rights.
• At the team-level, every time we went out together on weekends, I challenged the team to complete 50K steps (together) and that I would buy them breakfast as a reward.  Again, we never reached that goal but we came pretty darn close several times.
• Reward team successes: The first time we moved up 26 positions into the top-70 group, I got every one on the team a sport water bottle.  That was a very tiny gesture but I am sure we will remember that in relation to our accomplishment for a long time to come…
• Focus on giving your best rather than to win: Right from the beginning we knew we had no chance of reaching into the top 20, but we nevertheless kept trying; our best performance was the 44th spot and ultimately ended up at position number 59.
• Outperform yourself, not others: We never compared our performance to others.  Our individual and team goal was to beat the previous week’s step count by 10% or more.

Oh, by the way, all of us lost tons of weight as a direct result of this exercise and feel a whole lot fitter.  We promised each other (during our victory lunch celebration) that we would keep up with the healthful walking, albeit at a scaled down level

We discussed two topics under "Principles of People development" this week:

• It takes time
• People skills are essential for success

We focused mostly on some of the characteristics of great leaders including: they admit mistakes, they are able to get along with a wide variety of people, and they possess sensitivity & tact.

We dwelled in great detail on one specific area - "being able to get along with a wide variety of people".  We agreed that this skill is a necessary evil, especially in the workplace if one wants to grow in a leadership role.  We talked about some mutual friends who adamantly resist socializing with new people (or even with people from their existing social networks) because many people they come across do not share the same values or interests as their own.  This is a genuine and understandable concern.  We wavered for a long time whether the same justification holds good in a workplace as well?  We never came to a definitive conclusion but agreed that everyone, especially "leaders" have to make some compromises/sacrifices for the greater good and getting along with a variety of people is one of them (even though not everyone might share the same values, principles, interests etc.)

For more details about this chapter, please review the mindmap at: Chapter 7: People