The Art of Nurturing High-Performance Teams | Aun Raza | TEDxInstituteOfSpaceTechnology
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiaxGHM6Bvg Video ID: kiaxGHM6Bvg ============================================================ [Music] so my name isra it's an easy name to remember unlike our friend I'm going to walk you through my learning and my journey of how to build high performance teams and we will do our best you and I to make it little bit interactive let's let's see this beautiful picture this picture holds a very dear place in my heart and most of the learnings I did in my life for building strong teams came through this picture so please take a moment on expense of my allocated 15 minut and take a while gu which place is this a little louder please so one guess it's in the northern part of Pakistan it's the most beautiful country in the world and it's not sa Mal all right so uh since this place is very less explored so this is called D pser Lake it is in the northern part of Pakistan 4 hour from Nan takes you to a place called Basel and from Basel you can actually start hike to reach this uh this place so it's a 12h hour intense hike which you need to do to reach this place and this is called Queen of the lakes in Pakistan as well so I I I believe lot of us have been northern part of Moran or this part of the of the country correct so this story which I'm telling is 15 year old so it's a it happened somewhere uh in 2009 and 10 thanks to the unavailability of good roads it took us 20 hours to reach the place where you can actually start hike for this uh in order to reach this l so this place as I mentioning called Basel so it took us 20 hour to reach Basel by Road uh because the road was not as good as they are at the moment now and from there we started 12 hour heke to reach this Lake this basically all the struggle you go through if you have a queen to meet in your life you will be very happily make an arrangement to do this and one disclaimer the picture quality is pathetic I know that because at that time there was hardly four or 6 megapixel cameras not like the latest iPhone we have at the moment so please bear with that and uh when you make uh when you make a group of different people you always run into a very strange challenges so 15 years ago let me remind that and we were building our company we were building our company and we were people of uh uh different background different experiences and thanks to baset final story I do come fromi area uh it's not a hilly area so for us I think is a big deal and I am also educated from D so I was relating a lot to what s was saying so we were people of like we were 10 to 15 people all of us were different different background different experiences different skill set different likes and dislikes and we were building our company we were starting our team and we were working to very tight head lines we were under a lot of pressure and stress and seems like we were failing on almost every deliverables almost every Target it was so frustrating nothing was working out and we sat together at a p St in the evening and all of us were very dejected uh feeling depressed discouraged and one of our person suggested that okay guys let's take a break from all the madness we are doing and go some place far off from internet and electricity and truly spend sometime there away from all these gadgets and see if we are truly the right group of people to build this company or not this is when we thought okay let's meet this beautiful queen and we finalize this place because according to our Google research this place was far off from internet and electricity so we started our journey from Basel after 20 hour bus ride immediately because all of us were not Hiers we were software developers and jors and we did not know the basics of how to start a hike but we started our hike with a spike of energy and as we progressed through Meadows and we walked over mountains after some time the energy started to fade out so all of us we notice that we were starting to argue and not to mention that this particular place the temperature is usually between manage time to manage 20 C so we software engineer people of different physical capabilities taking a height of 12 hours after a 20 hour long bus ride and we were hungry and tired and we were in man 12 C temperature so when you are hungry and tired there is always negative energy that keeps in you so you start to fight on on baseless things I think it happens to us in our home as well when our mothers have not cook food for us we go and we and we fight so that's the same thing that was happening there but we were fighting and we were arguing with one another and we were yelling at one another for stuff that doesn't matter but what happened was I noticed that the whole conversation slowly started to move in our professional Direction so someone was blaming me that I did not support him at work likewise I was blaming to lot of people that they were not up to the par at certain tasks so at the elevation of 3500 me this lake is at an elevation of 3500 M which is equivalent to somewhere around 13,000 ft so we were fighting we were arguing we were clearing the air so it took us 2 hour to argue F and clear the air and we all felt light-hearted just like when you fight with your friends you are angry you are frustrated but of some time you feel light-hearted and the Same Love same affection comes back to you so same thing happened so the opportunity of being vulnerable at the elevation of 3500 me with one another truly transformed us and it created a bond Among Us which is stronger than anything else in our life now and we never fail on any project after that so my dear students all of you have to start a professional Journey so when you are starting your professional Journey you are building your teams you are building your Empires and if you are starting a new chapter of your personal life never underestimate the power of vulnerability let your friends your team member your colleague or even your life partner be vulnerable with you give them space to express themselves so once they express themselves and you listen to them that's one the people come together Truly Come Together and they become one [Music] team so the second lesson we learned was always find the right balance when you are building team people will tell you that you need to have all the top performers in team that you need to have all the people with highest cgpa in your team or you need to have everyone with gold medalist in your team that's not right in myle experience uh building a team is like putting together a piece of puzzle all you need is finding the right pieces so for your problem you're trying to solve the right pieces might not be the top performer so always be open to the idea of having people of diverse experience diverse skill set people of different mindset in your team that's when you trly build a high performance team because high performance team is all about finding the right balance and sometime the top performer or the rock stars may not be the right uh fit for your uh the problem which you are trying to solve okay I think this is the most important one so there are a lot of organizations out there and especially in my Walk of Life who are purely working for financial gains their whole efforts and everything revolves around monetary rewards when you are building your teams you are building your organizations even you are building your product make sure this things should have a vision and sell your vision to your team to your people sell your dream to your people make it their Vision make it their dream have them run with it so you will see that when people believes in Your Vision they can go to any length to make it happen uh there is always monetary aspect is always overrated yes it has certain role to play but for good companies good teams good organizations good products there will always be the vision who will take the front seat and money and monetary things will take the back seats so at at that Lake we spent one night camping and we had hard time installing the camps because we were not trained at that and we when we were there all settled so we looked at at the style and we looked Stars after so long because we we were living in the city we were going through he work routines all of us were working late nights and we looked at the sky and we saw the stars and we thought all of us are so grateful all of us are so privileged to have so much in life so we felt thankful for everything we had in life and that's where we came up with mission for our company so what we do is we build software products for digital Health uh purposes so at that time we started talking like old Mo we we said when we are going back to our workplace we are going back as one unit and we will not only be building these products for financial purposes but we will also make sure that the products we are building will have an impact on the population of the world that is underprivileged or don't have access to Good Health Care Facilities last one in your team if you are the only one who is decision maker then you are creating a bottl leg if you are out for one week everything will come to stand still so this is very important even if you building a small team you're building a big company you are building your Empire make sure you Empower your people with good decision making skills so the practice I adopt is whenever I make any decision in my organization I call my people together and explain to them why I made this decision so why factor is always important in life so if you have to do any work there are three aspects to it uh the very popular Golden Circle what needs to be done how to do it and why to do it everyone knows what needs to be done and how to do it only leaders Knows Why to do it so being a leader or being a in charge of your group always Empower your people to question why they should have this sense in them that they can make decisions they are empowered to make decisions and 100% of them those decision will not be the best ones or successful and it happens to all of us please bear with them but more importantly if you have given them this sense that they can see at the why factor of making a decision they will always surprise you and let me surprise you with this picture I'm not sure our friends in the back can see it or not so on our way to this Lake we came across this river crossing the river crossing was so wide that you cannot jump over it unless you are your gold then you can definitely do it water flow was so quick so cold and so deep that walking through the water will paralyze you immediately and the only way to reach to the other end of the river was to a rope which was tied to wooden pole on one end and some heavy stones on the other sounds exciting so to my surprise when we reached there one of our team member volunteered to go first and he was somewhere around 130 kg in weight and all of us if I recall correctly the average weight of everyone else in the group might be somewhere between 70 to 80 kg but the person who was volunteering to go first was somewhere in30 pages and I asked him why he said if I am able to cross it successfully everyone else in my team will believe that they can do it too so this is the power of why than youing power so I think I'm going to quickly I do have a dream to share and I will love it if this can become a collective dream for all of us in my industry we do software exports and in 2023 alone our Beloved Country did software exports worth $480 million and the projections are that in next four year by 2028 we will be doing software exports worth2 billion per year but the dream is we can take it to 4 billion per year or $5 billion per year all it will need need for that dream to be success is if Academia and Industry work together on creating a shared vision and this applies to all the disciplines we are teaching in universities so if we want to develop our country as a big player on Global Market let's work together create a shared Vision which should be driven by industry to some extent which should address what Global Market needs in next four or five years and empow our student with that particular skill set and on my concluding load when I woke up in the morning we were camping there when I woke up in the morning this is the first scene I saw my eyes were woke up to this mesmerizing view of this beautiful Lake and and I asked to myself the magnitude of your success will always depend on the magnitude of challenges you have gone through in your life so when you are going through tough time in your professional life and you are working for your dream for your vision and the time is tough problems are immense and you are not seeing a way to get out of those always remember your challenges will Define the height of your achievements and always believe when you are going through challenges that there is a beautiful queen like that waiting for you on the other end of the tunnel thank you [Music]