Ed Batista
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Dancing Your Way to a Better Team
How do you maintain team cohesiveness during periods of extensive turnover? You could try dancing.
The Oakland A's Triple-A affiliate in Sacramento, the River Cats, have seen an astounding number of players pass through their clubhouse this season--a player has been called up or sent down 174 times, according to a recent article in the SF Chronicle by Susan Slusser.
Despite this turmoil on the roster, the River Cats won their division and are about to begin the Pacific Coast League's playoffs, a feat that A's assistant general Manager David Forst calls "incredible." So how did manager Tony DeFrancesco keep his team together? Slusser offers an explanation:
Infielder J.J. Furmaniak, who's bounced between Sacramento and Oakland this summer, said that DeFrancesco was proactive about making sure new faces felt included. He did that by having every addition introduce themselves during pre-game stretching--and then doing a dance. [emphasis mine]
"Even the big-league guys did it," Furmaniak said. "Well, (Mark) Kotsay did some dancing, anyway. Tony made sure no one was sitting alone in a corner, everyone was interacting."
I love this idea, and it's relevant even if dancing wouldn't fly with your team. The underlying concept is twofold: first, as a leader you need to take proactive steps to connect people when turnover is high, and second, that process will have a greater impact if you find a shortcut around the interpersonal barriers that exist among strangers.
Having new players introduce themselves to everyone is a good plan--and most managers would have stopped there. The brilliant wrinkle that DeFranceso added was having them do a dance as well, which got everyone laughing and brought the new guys into the fold much more quickly.
I haven't danced in front of my current colleagues, but a few weeks ago we did an improv session with Chris Sams of BATS Improv that included a lot of physical movement and a lot of silliness as well. It was a great opportunity to get loose and have some fun, and afterwards we felt more connected as a team, even though we'd been working together for the better part of a year. There's much more to be said about the value of improv in a team-building context, but the relevance here is that the exercises allowed us to see a different, less formal, more personal side of ourselves than we usually present at the workplace, and I imagine the River Cats' dances had the exact same effect.
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