No Man Is an Island: The Need for Team Connection at Work

One of the most significant elements I’ve found that leads to fulfillment in my job is the feeling that I am a part of a team, a part of something larger than myself. You can’t advance a cause or a purpose by yourself. You need teammates to help realize that vision. And for the first few months of my sales job, I didn’t feel like I was on a team.

I am an individual contributor and could easily go through my day and complete everything I need to, be productive, and not talk to a single person on my team. My sales were my own, so it didn’t seem necessary to spend the time forcing team building.

Those thoughts quickly faded after a few months of feeling alone on an island. I felt stuck and trending towards burnout. Going into the office a couple of days a week helped, but there was still something missing. I thought back to times when I was on teams where I felt a part of something bigger than myself and when I felt connected to my teammates. I thought of my experiences working with the staff and intern team at Evolving Minds, where every week we would practice one of the 4 Resilience Skills. It was simple practices – Gratitude, Joy, Seeing Goodness, and Hope – but these skills helped us form connections with each other through vulnerability and storytelling.

I wanted to capture that feeling again. That was what was missing from my siloed sales job. I went to my manager and asked if we could carve out 20 minutes a week to practice some team-building skills. I told him I would handle and lead everything and that it would require no extra work on his end. I feel very fortunate that I work in a place and had a manager who trusted me enough to say yes to that proposal with little to no questioning or doubt.

I was on a team of seven sales reps. We are all male, and we all do the same job for the same company. But our team was far from homogeneous. Our ages ranged from 23 to 55, some of us were quiet and soft-spoken, and others were probably more of what you think of personality-wise when you think of a salesperson – loud, charismatic, and commanding attention. We all grew up in different parts of the world, spanning several continents, and even now are in very different living situations. I currently live in downtown Washington, D.C., but others lived in Maryland and raised animals on their farm, and one of us lived in Chicago. Some of us just graduated college, and some of us had kids who were about to graduate college. We were always friendly, kind, and genuine with one another, but I was anxious to bring in the resilience skills to this group of mismatched personalities and backgrounds. 

We started with Gratitude. Nothing crazy or groundbreaking normally happens in the first session, because vulnerability and connection take time. And that’s why we were going to practice these skills every week. People were sharing, not being judgmental, and were open to embrace these skills – which is all I could ask for. Over time, as we practiced, the culture of our team started to change. It’s hard to recognize change over time when you’re in it, so I didn’t realize our culture was changing until other managers in the organization started mentioning it to me. I had several managers tell me that our team seemed different than it had earlier in the year. We were communicating differently than the other teams and were seeming to be forming our own identity. We were asking each other for help more often and being more transparent with what we were struggling with in the job. Our team group chats were more lively and active than every other team. And we were the only team that made an effort to come into the office on the same days so we could all be together. Leaders within the organization had noticed this and started asking me what our secret was, what had changed. 

I told them it was very simple. I’m sure it’s a lot of factors that led to this change in team culture, but I believe consistently practicing our resilience skills was the match that ignited that flame. I hadn’t realized how much more vulnerable our resilience activities had become, either. People were sharing more stories about their personal lives, about what made them anxious and where they had been finding success recently. We were more comfortable sitting in silence and even came to appreciate it. We felt like we were on a team, and no matter how our individual sales were going on the quarter, I didn’t feel like an individual contributor alone on an island. I resonated more with the successes of my teammates and empathized deeper with their misses.

The benefits of practicing Gratitude, Joy, Seeing Goodness, and Hope in a team setting have been clear to me for a few years now due to my experience with the Evolving Minds team. However, the individual benefits of practicing these skills are only now starting to make themselves clear to me. 

One of my teammates at work pulled me aside one day and told me that he was bringing firewood into this house with his young daughter, and had a two-second period where he just looked at her and felt such joy in that moment. He expressed how grateful he was to have his daughter help him with this task and how much getting to spend those moments with her meant to him. He told me how before we started practicing our resilience skills, that these moments would pass him by. He expressed how much more he had been able to hold onto these moments with his wife and daughter over the past few months.

That’s the goal of these exercises: to blur the line between formal practice and our everyday lives. We practice these skills in a formal setting, looking back at our last few days or weeks to pull out moments of Gratitude, Joy, Goodness, and Hope. But what we are working toward is to be able to recognize these moments as they appear, to connect with the present moment and find fulfillment there. I told my teammate how much I appreciated him sharing that with me and how much it meant to me that he had found value outside of the workplace from these practices.

A couple of months ago I changed teams, and now I am with a new manager and an entirely new group of sales reps. In my first meeting with my new manager, I asked if I could have 20 minutes every week to lead a team-building activity. He said, “Oh yeah, I heard about those and was hoping you would be willing to bring those exercises into our team. Absolutely you can.”

Jason Malkofsky-Berger

Previous Intern and Resilient Leader Graduate of Evolving Minds. Marketing Programs Manager at Industry Dive.