Growing as a person while growing your assets!
The Personal Growth Series.

Introduction to the Personal Growth Series - feat. Splinterlands

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One of the topics I enjoy reading about is Personal Growth. Chasing my best self is something that makes me wake up in the morning because I have so many flaws that this task will surely keep me busy for a lifetime or two.

The other thing that made me want to start this series is the fact that building assets within the Splinterlands’ ecosystem require a lot of patience and time. We do spend a good chunk of our time trying to grow our assets in this game, so why not find ways to grow as a person at the same time?

In this series, I’ll try to revisit a few concepts, I gathered through my personal growth journey, from a Splinterlands casual player’s perspective. By doing so, we will hopefully be able to learn, or most probably review, a few things while having fun together.

Teamwork, the Cornerstone Of Success

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In periods of new lows, it is sometimes natural to start doubting our past investment choices. I had not yet experienced this feeling with Splinterlands, but I know that many might already have. In those moments, it is, I believe, essential to get back to the core elements that first built our confidence in a given project. Once done, we should ask ourselves: have any of those key elements changed?

Personally, if I have to narrow down my own belief in the Splinterlands project, I would say that beyond the game’s well-thought economics, the maturity of the product in an emerging industry or the strong community behind it, the very core thing that got me excited about Splinterlands is the transparency of the Development Team since the beginning.

Therefore, I thought it would be interesting to study what are the foundations of great teams. This will not only help us detect potential red flags in any projects we are involved in but also build better teams for our own projects. A great idea might start within a single individual’s mind, yet to make it becomes a reality, finding the right people is the only way to make it happen.

In this post, we will look at Team Building from two different perspectives, one more theoretical and the other more practical. I found that the intersections between those two often reveal the most interesting insights.

The Theoretical Perspective

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What makes a Good Team?

On the surface, we might expect great teams to work smoothly without any friction. They might even appear that way, but behind the scenes, a lack of conflict isn’t what makes them great.

In his book, the 5 Dysfunctions Of A Team, Patrick M. Lencioni listed the five reasons why a team fails to come together.

The First Dysfunction: ABSENCE OF TRUST

A lack of conflict reveals a lack of trust between each other. By conflict, the author means productive conflicts, not negative tensions. The atmosphere created by the management team should give permission for honest disagreements.

The Second Dysfunction: FEAR OF CONFLICT

It takes courage to create such a culture where there is a substantial level of debate, rather than to settle for an artificial harmony.

The Third Dysfunction: LACK OF COMMITMENT

This reminds me of one of Amazon’s Leadership Principles: Disagree and Commit. In theory, this management principle gives authority to anyone to disagree, and once a decision has been made, everyone must give their best and commit to what has been decided.

The objective is to avoid the consensus trap, which leads to inaction. By making sure everybody’s opinion has been heard, we hopefully clarify the reasons why a given decision has to be made. Then, committing to the decision is in the best interest of the whole team.

The Fourth Dysfunction: AVOIDANCE OF ACCOUNTABILITY

By silently not buying into a decision, an individual cultivates a certain degree of ambiguity that can be used as an alibi to avoid further accountability. Well, he or she hasn’t committed to anything after all!

Artificial harmony leads to low standards because ambiguity makes it very easy to lower the indicators of performance once the time for accountability comes.

The Fifth Dysfunction: INATTENTION TO COLLECTIVE RESULTS

When there is no cohesion in a team, each member will naturally look for individual recognition, status, and ego. This is when a team of All-Stars can still manage to incredibly fail.

The Practical Perspective

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Phil Jackson is certainly one of the most respected coaches in the NBA. From the Bulls to the Lakers, he successfully managed to bring strong characters together despite the animosity between certain players. Winning a Championship is hard enough, but having been able to make the magic happen again and again 11 times, there must be a few things we can learn from.

The first thing we notice right away is none of those teams was afraid of conflicts. In the Last Dance series, the fight between Michael Jordan and Steve Kerr ended up building a strong feeling of trust between them. On the contrary, the tension between Shaq and Kobe put an end to their partnership. Thus, the line between productive conflict and negative tension is definitely a thin one.

To avoid a lack of commitment from his players, Phil Jackson was laser-focused on the quest they were on together. To him, the ring represented something much more profound than a simple trophy, it was something that could unite the players and help them form a brotherhood along the journey. By doing so, avoiding accountability would have meant letting down “brothers”.

In his book “Eleven Rings”, Phil Jackson mentioned a quote from his player-partner, Michael Jordan: “Success turns WE’s back into ME’s.” This reveals that even the greatest teams can still fall back into the trap of inattention to collective results. Therefore, the only way to sustain success is to keep growing as a team. By then, the quest becomes a never-ending quest for constant improvement.

The Splinterlands Team

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AGGROED	YABAPMATT

Starting with Matt and Aggroed, the two co-founders of the game, don’t seem to have any trouble respectfully disagreeing with each other. For long, they didn’t agree on when to communicate specific information regarding the economics of the game to the community, as those could change depending on when the updates would occur. We all know that in the cryptocurrency world, things can change really fast.

Another example, on perhaps a lighter note, was that they didn’t seem to agree on how long the Chaos Legion packs would take to sell out. Behind closed doors, they probably had tons of disagreements that we never knew publicly. Yet, we can genuinely sense that they trust each other. They both know the strengths of their partner and certainly know how to transform their disagreements into productive outcomes.

The transparency of the team about the different timelines they are shooting for is a form of accountability. Sure, recently they haven’t done a great job at hitting those deadlines, but delays are part of the gig, especially when trying to build something innovative. I still appreciate the extreme level of confidence the whole team communicates to the community. It seems that they have no doubt they will deliver the features they have promised.

Aggroed seems to care about creating a healthy corporate culture where people feel valued. He trusts the team they’ve built. He also recently shared his management style by describing it as strongly focused on recruiting the most suitable people and then, letting them do their work. The fact that they always try to give credit to one another is, to me, a sign of an empowering atmosphere that is directing their efforts towards collective results.

Will they successfully attract new players, deliver on the additional features, and retain the current player base in a timely manner? I do believe they will! What do you think?

Am I fooling myself?

In the meantime, I try to take advantage of this accumulation phase to the extent of my abilities. And hopefully, this will turn out to be the right thing to do!

Cheers!

Thomas

For new players interested in joining this amazing game, you can support me by using the following referral link (at no extra cost to you!):

https://splinterlands.com?ref=tt88

Thank you.