Vulnerability, sharing enhance team growth

This article in Fast Company touched upon the benefit of communication in the workplace, in a slightly different way.  Still, of course, a valuable way, but sharing in a unique way.

In her book, (author Susan) Cain shares an example of a company that normalized sharing personal woes. Midwest Billing, the billing unit of a community hospital in Jackson, Michigan, created a culture in which it was assumed that every worker had personal troubles. Instead of being seen as a flaw, sharing troubles provided opportunities for teammates to demonstrate compassion. Employees cared for each other during divorces, domestic violence, deaths in the family, and even when someone had a cold.

In addition to being good for mental health, sharing troubles was a boost for business. “During the five years prior to the study, Midwest Billing got its bills collected more than twice as fast as before, beating industry standards. Turnover rate in the unit was only 2%, compared with an average of 25% across all of Midwest Health System, and a significantly higher rate across the medical billing industry,” writes Cain.

We believe teambuilding is critical--especially in today's challenging workplace.  Our In-Tune model introduces a sense of vulnerability, that is shared across all participants.  While we agree with the full article, our method does not single out "personal" vulnerabilities.  The entire team is learning, empathizing and rocking out together, as they learn to play music, together.  

Our teambuilding workshops build trust.  The "band members" will make mistakes, as they learn.  And the article's conclusion reinforces that those human elements are important for a team:

“As we know from [Harvard Business School professor] Amy Edmonson’s work on psychological safety, people work best in an atmosphere of trust, an environment in which they can say something wrong and feel that others have their back,” says Cain. “But psychological safety extends to the feeling of being able to be a less than ideal human—and we are all less than ideal humans.”