When working with teams, I often don’t have a lot of time. Teamwork is a vast and varied topic and I try my best to use the allotted time as effectively as possible, covering as much as I can, as effectively as I can, but I sometimes feel that we go over so much ground it all becomes a little bit overwhelming.

I like to try to leave people with real, actionable commitments that they can take away and implement to improve how they work together. That’s ultimately my aim. Sometimes we have enough time to get some really great movement forward, but sometimes that’s just not possible.

For example, last week I helped run a great team building session, where we put a group through a Mount Everest climbing simulation called Peak Performance. (Well worth considering if you want to give your team a practical test of their team working skills!). I had 30 minutes to offer feedback and summarise lessons at the end, and it occurred to me that I really am only going to be able to realistically leave them with one or two key bits of advice.

So what would that be? What would my number one, quick, simple bit of advice to team members be, that would be the easiest thing to do and have the highest impact on that team’s success? It’s very simple. Something that is called ‘The Golden Rule’:

Treat others they way you would like to be treated. Why do I rate this as the #1 piece of advice for how to work in a team? Here’s why:

It Is So Simple Yet Speaks Volumes

It’s so quick and  simple to remember, yet it encompasses so much about how to interact with, work with, and communicate with other people – the basic essence of all teamwork. It’s also familiar to everyone because of the next point:

It Is Proven

This concept, although written in many different ways, is a key pillar of every major religion that man has ever invented. We wouldn’t hold it so sacred, across nearly every culture and society that we have ever created, if it didn’t work.

It Has Empathy

I toyed with the possibility that the number 1 rule should read ‘be nice’. I decided against it for a number of reasons, primarily because that doesn’t have enough empathy. Empathy is an absolutely fundamental behaviour in teams, and this sentence makes you really think about other people and how they are feeling, especially based upon the impact of your actions. Successful teams have high empathy quotients, and thinking about how you would like to be treated and then treating others that way is a great way to create empathetic action.

So if you do nothing else to improve your teamwork, just ask yourself every day ‘Am I treating my team mates how I would want them to treat me’? It’s such a simple but effective way of making sure you are behaving correctly and enabling your team to move happily towards greater success.