Monthly Archives: April 2024

Here’s a picture of a cholla garden in the Mojave desert in California:

Cholla cactus in the Mojave desert. It’s hard to imagine a more challenging environment. The plants themselves have a certain beauty. They look soft and faintly glowing in the picture. But, in order to survive, they have to reproduce. If you have ever walked past a Cholla cactus, you know how they do it. Those lovely little yellow puff-balls break off rather easily. You can’t pass within a meter of a Cholla without having a stickery stowaway stuck to your pant-leg or boot. If you’re a coyote, it’s stuck in your fur. And off it goes to find a new home, to wait 6 or 12 months for the next tiny rainfall when it can take root and grow and sent off new burrs out into the wide world.

Cholla are patient. And they thrive in one of the most hostile environments on the planet. If you want to build a team in the desert (whether it’s the African desert, or the concrete desert), you will have to be patient. Cholla are resilient. Their DNA will last months in the arid wastes of the Mojave. Cholla are adapted to their world. Their spines are barbed so that they will tenaciously stick to whatever they touch: skin, fur, clothing, etc.

If we hope to be successful in building teams in tough contexts, we will need patience, we will need resilience and we will need to be adaptable. How can you build those different aspects into your habits so that they will eventually become part of your character? You can do it, but it will be painful and it will require both intentionality and discipline. As my Québécois friends love to say, “Let’s go!”

Gigi and Greg spent 17 years building a multicultural team that could respond to the needs of poor and marginalized African peoples. After multiple failed attempts, we all learned to work together toward a common vision, and we produced! They later moved their family to Spain where they continued their work coaching leaders to build teams in some of the harshest settings imaginable: with 45°C heat, many hours from a major city, and poor or no running water.

Many of the teams they coached have had incredible longevity in their locations, and have built durable and compassionate solutions for their African neighbors.

The core principles of team building apply to your context too. Because teams are more about human interaction than they are about a particular context, the main ideas can make a difference whatever your situation. We hope that you will join us as we explore the ideas that can lead you to great teamwork and great results.

This site is about building great teams in the harshest settings. It’s what I’ve been doing for more than half of my life. Patrick Lencioni (you’ll run into him a lot here) said, “It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare.” Take a second to stop and think about that. I would rephrase that statement this way,

“If your team is functioning effectively, you will achieve your goals,
if they are indeed achievable.”

You’ll achieve your goals because you’ll all have each others’ backs. When I fail in my role, another team member will backstop me and make sure the task gets done. The enemy of success is isolation. No one is “better off on their own,” at least as far as achieving productive work. I want to take you on a journey toward building your own team’s top performance.

I believe that men and women were created to work and to take joy in the work of their hands. And, it is in teamwork that we can achieve our greatest successes.