This Important Principle Has a Huge Impact on Teams – Servant Teamwork

A Giving Heart is the Best Kind of Heart.

A few years ago I was having lunch with a friend who is an Emergency Room Doctor at the local hospital in our town. We sat comfortably at our favorite Mexican restaurant in a quiet booth surrounded by sombreros, colorful Spanish art and soft music eating tortilla chips and salsa. The perfect lunch!

I asked him a question that would completely change the way I thought about teamwork. I asked him, “What does teamwork look like in the Emergency Room?”

He said it is about knowing the needs of each person on the team and how to assist and serve them. If the team is focused on one another’s needs, they literally save lives.

I understood the concept of Servant Leadership – leaders who are servants first. Many religious leaders in our history have been servant first leaders such as Jesus, Mohammad and more recently Mahatma Gandhi. But from that day forward I began to also think about Servant Teamwork.

When members of a team focus on each other’s needs, great things happen to how they work with each other. Teammates truly become servants to one another and the level of caring and trust on the team are largely magnified.

As you serve others on your team, amazing things happen to you as well. Mahatma Gandhi said it best, “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.”

There is a natural and wonderful positive correlation I have seen all of my life – when people begin to serve others, they start to love and really care about those they serve. And as their feelings of caring are heightened they have a desire to serve them more. What a great foundation and pattern for teamwork and more importantly life!

Have you ever had a teammate that did something for you? How did you feel about that person? If you are like most, you never forgot the nice deed. And the “likability” of that person who served you increased. After the kind deed you most likely felt different about that person each time you saw them.

Doing something nice for someone completely changes how we feel about them and how they feel about us. Could you imagine if every member of the team was actively looking for ways to serve each other what it would do towards how the team worked together?

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