I think you would all agree that this is NOT how to treat your car:

Or do this to it:

Or have this many people crammed into it:

What has this got to do with teamwork? Well, it’s a simple but very effective metaphor. If you abuse or neglect your car, what happens? It starts to breakdown and fail to do what it is designed to do –  get you from A to B in a reliable, safe and timely manner.

So you look after your vehicle. You wash it on a Sunday (or get someone else to wash it for you if you live in Dubai!). You change the oil, get it serviced regularly, fix repairs. Some people enhance and improve them – souped up engines, wide tires, tinted windows, fluffy dice hanging from the wing mirrors – the possibilities are endless.

You need to treat your team the same as you would a car, and so many people don’t. They just think the team doesn’t need any maintenance, enhancements, upgrades or care of any kind. And this becomes dangerous. Without it, your team can suffer and start to fail to do what you want it to.

My advice to you is take care of your team! Take some time to assess if it needs some intervention. Do you need to work on some aspect of how it functions? Add/subtract members? Enhance capabilities? Invest? Coach? Build? Train? Re-equip? Again, the possibilities of how you change it are many. But inactivity is dangerous. Why would you run your team like a car that hasn’t had a service, oil change or a clean in ages? Would you get in it?