I believe that a bridge is analogous to a team, the pillars of the bridge need to support the weight and a large span to allow the traffic to flow above it. Not a lot of thought is given to the pillars and the vital role that they play in allowing everything to continue as usual. If you didn’t have the supporting pillars or you didn’t have enough of them or if a couple of them were not structurally sound the bridge would fall down, cars would fall off, people would be severely injured or die, in short, it would be a disaster.
On the surface, this shows that we need a lot of support and the right support to keep the bridge upright but it is more than that, Shawn Achor’s research showed that “social support is the greatest predictor of happiness during periods of high stress.” In addition to this though, Shawn also found that people who provide social support to others at work were ten times more likely to be engaged and 40 per cent more likely to get a promotion!
So it turns out that when we invest in supporting others we feel good and reap the returns. When we show support to our team our connection improves, we feel appreciated and thus are more engaged. When you have a team who look out for each other and offer each other support it is a sign of genuine care and consideration of others. The support should ideally come from all members of the team - not just the leader, we need several pillars to hold up the bridge. The responsibility of the leader is to instil a culture, where it is known, that supporting our colleagues will be advantageous to all.
Providing support in the first 12 weeks in the organisation is the most vital. The difference between a new starter sinking or swimming is the support that they receive during that time. The investment of support early on is directly correlated to the return that will be reaped during the employee’s tenure. Furthermore, when someone else comes into the team they will remember the support they received and will do the same. A company that relies on a sink or swim attitude to onboarding and cultivates employees who are reluctant to help because “they never got any when they started” is destined to spiral into a poor culture where underperformance is accepted, and employees are disengaged.
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