In my opinion, the minimum acceptable height of “the bar” is to be a decent human. You see, it’s in times of great stress and conflict that the words I live by come into play the most. When the going gets tough, sometimes everything boils down to a fairly basic choice—to be a decent human being, or allow base instinct and ego to take over and say/do things that I’ll regret later. “Andy, just be a decent human being right here, right now.” But what does decency mean? Let’s explore.

Unfortunately, we avoid talking about self love because it’s a deeply personal subject and carries with it a stigma. A label that self love is too fuzzy and squishy. A label that you’re somehow showing weakness if you discuss self love. In my opinion, we need to elevate discussions of self love because respecting and loving oneself is the foundation upon which all other relationships rest.

When I use the word “you,” I’m speaking to myself as much as I’m speaking to my readers. I don’t have it all figured out, none of us do. We’re all works in progress. What I do have going for me is a diverse portfolio of leadership experiences, business “wins,” and a load of errors, challenges, and mistakes that I’ve turned into learning and growth opportunities through the years.

Good posture is both a physical construct and a mental state of being. Good posture is a way of living. Truthfulness, community service, self-confidence, self-awareness, situational awareness, emotional intelligence, and many other positive attributes are wrapped into the concept of good posture. Good posture signals to everyone around you that “I’m here, I’m ready to contribute, and I care.” When honed over time, good posture is the optimal balancing act between service to the self and service to others, but good posture starts with literally straightening the spine, brightening the eyes, and letting go of all the baggage you’re carrying around that doesn’t align with your purpose or your goals.

We learn and grow as humans when we look at a challenge through multiple lenses and take onboard information from multiple perspectives. To me, this is true freedom - the ability to learn from our mistakes, test and expand our capabilities through experiences and education, pursue individual happiness and self-actualization, and meaningfully contribute to society with our unique gifts and talents.

There are a few additional aspects of team chemistry that are not included in our list and those are the concepts of finesse and tact. Understanding nuance is also critically important to team chemistry. These are skills that don’t receive much attention in the myriad lists of “top skills for the future,” but I would argue that they form the foundation for all high-functioning teams that sustain their performance over the long term.

We’ve all heard these phrases before: “My team just clicks,” “My team is a well-oiled machine,” “My team is really gelling,” “My team has great chemistry,” and the ever-nauseating “Teamwork makes the dream work.” This week, I’d like to explore the concept of team chemistry to determine if it’s as mysterious as it’s often made out to be, or if there are necessary conditions that underlie team chemistry and make it something we can create and extend from one team to another.

Intellectually, I am keenly aware that I should objectively evaluate what went wrong through an after-action review (AAR), engage in a learning activity, communicate why what I’ve learned will produce different results in the future, and implement a change to my standard work (i.e., the current set of best practices) to reduce the likelihood of recurrence. Reality can be quite different. It’s easy to allow feelings of inadequacy to cloud my judgement. It’s easy to wallow in the valley of despair. It’s easy to throw a pity-party and remain “stuck.” A vicious cycle can ensue in which being “stuck” leads to more misses and feelings that you just can’t do anything right.

Living this new life with brand new shiny titanium hips comes at a cost. The cost is that certain movements are prohibited - especially twisting like a pretzel or creating an acute angle between the upper and lower body. There is a mindset shift that accompanies transformational biomechanical surgeries. I am a better version of myself, but I can no longer allow “I can do anything” hubris to get the best of me. There’s an extra layer of situational awareness that I’ve had to build over the last two years that forces me to slow down and think before I act. I view this newfound situational and spatial awareness as an asset and not a liability.

The reality is that we are all different. Every member of a team has a unique set of change curves that is akin to a fingerprint. We all wear a one-size-fits-you pair of lenses that we see and interpret the world through. Assumptions of sameness quickly break down because for any individual change event that occurs—an acquisition, product sunset, or process change, to name just a few—each team member is going to process said change event differently.

I’m nearing my 60th birthday at the close of this coming summer and face a choice very similar to the choice that my parent’s generation faced in the late 1990s. I can either learn more about NLP, LLM, and what’s coming next, or I can tell myself that “I’m too old to learn something new” and be left in the dust—begging my children’s generation for the remainder of my years to help me use the avalanche of new tools and technologies that will undoubtedly sprout from today’s LLM seeds.