3 Days in Ibiza: Why Slowing Down Speeds Up The Team
By Lauren Burton
In May the partners of Lea_p were sitting in the sun trying to film the videos for our new offering Pattern Power; We were over preparing lines, getting in our head, making mistakes and we were laughing because we had to start over. Somewhere in all that practising, failing and laughing at each other I realised that this, the joy of being together, is exactly what makes us good at what we do.
Lea_p is a fully virtual company, we all live in different places and rarely sit in the same room together, so twice a year we gather here on the island of Ibiza, where I live, away from the noise of London, near the sea, in the quiet and the sun. This time, over three days we walked and hiked, swam in the sea, sat in the sauna, and we ate outside while the sunset over the water & cliffs.
There is a phrase I keep coming back to;
‘Slow is smooth and smooth is fast’
And the longer I lead and train this work, the more I believe it. When we are all working remotely it is so easy to fill every hour with back to back calls or delivering to our clients, and yet the things that make a team strong are almost never built in endless meetings. They are built in the quality of the time we choose to spend together - which doesn’t need to be daily or even weekly, but it does need to be quality.
These few days are not for the day to day running of the business, they are for the future of the business; how we are growing, where we are investing, what isn’t working and for coming back to the essence of Lea_p; our why and why we started this company in the first place. Over the past six months we have been building our AI infrastructure, shaping our new model, and growing our business. The only way to do this was by spending real time together, practising, brainstorming and failing, which is exactly what we did while the cameras were rolling.
One evening we sat over a long dinner and watched the sun drop into the sea, telling stories and connecting. This is how trust is built; in the small moments of integrity, vulnerability and experiencing things together. We are more than colleagues and we are there for each other when things are hard, and just as much in the joy, simply caring for one another. Leadership is 50% Functional and 50% Relational. Both are equally important but both are not given the same value.
What I am taking from these three days is that functionally we executed some great, meaningful and creative work altogether. And we also nourished our relationship, by giving it the value it deserves rather than squeezing it into the gaps between everything else. We consciously slowed down so that in the future we can work more smoothly together, we trust each other to make decisions and therefore our output is faster.
In a world where so many of us lead people we rarely see in person, that is the very thing that holds a team together when the hard times come. So the question I want to leave you with is a simple one, how can you create better relationships with your teams?
Here are a few of the things that help us, in case any of them are useful for you and your team:
Quality matters far more than proximity, because especially when a team is virtual it is the realness of the time we spend together that builds the relationship, not how often we meet.
Time out of the everyday brings us closer, because when we step away from the day to day together we meet each other as people rather than as roles.
Doing something physical together changes the relationship, because a walk, a swim and some fresh air build an ease between people that another hour at the desk never could.
Trust grows in the ordinary and the fun, because relationship is built through everyday integrity and being there in the hard times, and just as much through laughing together.
Busy is not the same as productive, because slow is smooth and smooth is fast, and when we give the relationship the value it deserves we come back more connected, more creative, and far more able to move fast together when it counts.
Lauren x
