Importance of creating an identity in your teams

Sense of Belonging

The most important outcome of creating an identity in your team is that you create a sense of belonging, and what does that sense of belonging mean? This refers to a human emotional need to affiliate with, and be accepted by members of a group.

Creating a sense of belonging means that you have shared goals, interest, alignment and others. And you know, this connects directly with the identity that we can create in our teams.

How do we create an identity?

For creating an identity, I think you need to focus on five super important points.

Goals and Objectives: You always need a northern star, because at any time, if the team lose track and don’t know where they are standing , having light at the end of the tunnel will lead them to the right place. This can look like a mission statement that all the team understand and feel part of.

Rules and Agreements: For this part, as a team, you need to set some playground rules to prevent a chaotic environment. Party and fun are pretty good, but in every team our goal is to give value and with chaos we might not achieve this. The minimum number of agreements that I recommend are , solving conflicts, communication and quality. With these points, you can have a starting point for any team.

Relations: We need to create relations in the team and positive communication. I highly recommend teaching all the team Radical Candor communication, and at least having a monthly space to interact with non-work subjects in the team.

Graphic Identity: Set a name and graphic definition (color or logo) to increase the sense of belonging in the team, the whole team needs to be happy with this decision, so a democratic approach doesn’t work here.

Recognition: This last part is maybe the most important part of the identity. This will help us have a higher engagement and help the team be more productive by being motivated. I’d highly recommend the use of Kudo’s or if your team is not that mature, you can use the Dragon and the Koi Fish dynamic.

Benefits of doing this

The most important thing that you will get is a team that shares responsibility in the results. Empower teams that feel open enough to propose initiatives and new ideas to improve and an open environment that foment creativity.

To accomplish this, you always need to keep in mind that this is not done by proclamation, this needs to be done by practice and experimentation.