What you learn about teams by washing dishes

Sometimes the greatest lessons about leadership and teamwork aren't learned in the boardroom - —they're discovered over a sink full of dishes, as Erickson-trained Coach Francesco Vannini found out...

In the past few months I have had the pleasure of doing some volunteering at the Buddhist Institute in Pomaia. It's a wonderful place, located in the Tuscany's hills, where monastics and the general public come together to offer various types of courses also in collaboration with the university of Pisa. Especially during the weekend the place is packed with visitors and the institute relies heavily on volunteers to keep up with the workload. The restaurant and the accommodations are where the brunt of the extra work is more felt throughout the year.

On both occasions I was there, I was mostly in and around the kitchen and restaurant, sharing the tasks and the space with other volunteers and staff, finding myself surrounded by all sorts of people coming from varied backgrounds and places all around the world.

So what can you learn about teams in such a place you would ask? Well, aside from a lot of camaraderie you can imagine that in a high paced, hot kitchen, tempers can sometimes get to the boiling point and if the group doesn't work out quickly the problems that arise, the whole chain quickly grinds to a halt in the best case slowing down service but also introducing deep rooted issues which afterwards require meetings and debriefings that cost the institute time and energy but mostly frustration among the volunteers and the staff.

Over time what I started observing wasn’t dissimilar from what I had experienced when working in enterprise IT this time though I looked through the lenses of what I learned in my coaching training with Erickson.

My findings are that working in a team requires trust, motivation, resilience, creativity and lots of energy

What struck me through the lens of a solution-focused coaching approach was that these qualities rarely appeared because someone imposed them. They emerged when the environment supported them. Rather than asking what people lacked, I found myself noticing what was already working and how the group naturally amplified it. 

This changed the question for me. Not, “How do we make people perform better?” But rather: “What conditions are we creating that allow people to perform at their best?”

Trust is the glue that links them all. To this day I know I can trust the people I worked with. Experiences like these create a deep bonding made upon a constant day to day effort to work as one, to be as one, to rely on each others. When working in a place where you know you can trust the people around you that’s where you can really grow not just as a team member but as a human being, expressing your difficulties and your opinions in a respecting, caring environment where you are heard not just listen to makes the whole difference.

Volunteering at the Lama Tzong Khapa Institute certainly helped me understanding more how trust is fundamental for the well being of a community, be that a group of volunteers or a team in an enterprise. Without it, the team simply isn’t one.

Energy is everything

Energy is particularly important, because when team members are tired, no motivation or creativity will avoid friction or incidents; you can be the most resilient person in the world, but you've got to rest. Often volunteers would try to go the extra mile because we all loved each other and wanted to help so that we could all sit down for a nice drink at the nearby bar. That wouldn't work in the long term, because people would end up running out of steam and the next shift was prone to start with some tension. These behaviors are at the origin of burnout and chronic stress disorders. Rest is discipline and self care but also something businesses and managers should recognize as an investment not a hindrance.  

Motivation is the "why I do this?" and one would think that volunteers, as well as staff, do this because they believe in the cause and, certainly for staff, because they also got a salary! Yet this is not enough. Motivation comes from your values and your identity, ultimately from the vision you have about your contribution to something be it a beautiful cause or a business. 

This reminded me of one of the strongest ideas I encountered during my coaching training: sustainable change rarely starts from pressure alone. It becomes possible when people connect their actions with something they deeply value and recognize themselves in.

Teams are no different, and that's when managers also come into the picture. People are a lot more motivated if they believe they are making a difference and if their contribution is well appreciated and supported. Things in the kitchen wouldn't work too well when only criticism was offered, whereas a simple "Well done! Thank you! Great job today!" at the end of a shift proved to do miracles.

Resilience is often linked to a character’s trait to be able to “bounce back” but you can create the conditions for people to be more resilient. From a solution-focused perspective, this means paying attention not only to moments where people struggle but also to moments where they already succeed. 

A friendly and supportive environment does a great deal to build resilience. Sometimes, during a very intense shift, the amount of dishes and guests would seem never-ending, but then suddenly someone would start making jokes, or they'd start singing, and before you knew it, the whole group would follow suit. The people responsible for the service would allow for an extra break and a cup of coffee, and then  off we went, back at it, but with renewed energy. Small changes in attention often produced disproportionate changes in the atmosphere. 

Creativity also proved to be one of the secret ingredients. You wouldn’t believe what people can come up with to make a shift shorter, more bearable or simply more efficient! The key there is to recognize, support, and adopt what comes out from a creative mind. Not only does the overall system benefit from it, but creativity springs creativity leading to a virtuous circle of continuous improvements and most importantly very engaged team members.

In closing...

The last reflection I’d like to make is arguably the most important for me. There could not be trust, motivation, creativity, reliance and energy without the desire and need to work on a common objective, a goal that united us all into wanting to wake up early in the morning and going to bed very late at night. We all wanted something we could recognize ourselves into, for the most diverse reasons and despite we came from the most disparate paths of life.

We did what we had to do because we wanted to and we believed in it. Everyone, whether volunteer or staff, chipped in when needed, with equanimity, nobody was too good or bad for the job at hand.

This is how a group of people becomes a team. 

About Francesco

Francesco Vannini is an Erickson-trained coach and long-term enterprise system engineer with experience on virtualization, operating systems, storage systems, networking and security. He's currently on a sabbatical year, transitioning from tech into a coaching career dedicated to mental health support and professional well-being.

To follow and connect with Francesco on LinkedIn, visit his profile.