Written by: Dani Bultitude, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Building a team when you work via Telehealth isn’t always that easy. There’s no popping out for a coffee, no hushed conversations about your weekend antics with a colleague as they pass by your desk. Our organisation provides a totally online service offering, inspired out of both necessity (did someone say lockdown 2021?) and a willingness to think outside of my own comfort zone as a novice entrepreneur.
So this is a little overview about what worked for our team on our first in person team building day. A day where our team of 8 met together in person for the first time.
As the CEO, I personally knew my two existing team members who had joined me in the early days of the business, but they as yet, didn’t know each other. The rest of the team had recently accepted a position approximately 2 weeks prior to coming along to the day. The task I had set myself was actually rather sizable: how to build a team in a day. Growing a team from three, to eight for a business that had launched just six months earlier.
So to warm everyone up I threw an inspirational quote from the indomitable Maya Angelou, reflective of our core business ethos:
“If you are always trying to be NORMAL, you will never know how AMAZING you can be.”
As a career social worker, I am used to surrounding myself with others from the helping professions. Often, we are a bit rubbish at getting vulnerable as we are so used to being the ones holding it together. Our team offers a professional service delivered by staff with lived experience of ADHD. So anyone willing to join the team needs to be willing to be not only highly professional, but authentic and real.
So just to ease everyone in, after providing an overview of the day, I manifest my inner Brene Brown and we start talking about trust.
The fundamentals of trust are:
Understanding that trust is built incrementally, moment by moment.
Show up, day after day, to the best of your ability
To be reliable for yourself, and others
To set boundaries so others know what they can expect ‒ overpromising and under-delivering creates uncertainty, even if done with good intentions
If you don’t know ‒ don’t bloody well pretend to know. But be prepared to go find out and share your learnings with others.
Being willing to take accountability for your actions, and grow from your experiences.
Effective leadership isn’t about having all the answers: it’s about being authentic ‒ admitting when you make a mistake; giving honest but kind feedback and nurturing your own abilities to respond, rather than react to the issues and challenges that come your way.
I shared my story with the team; about why I started the business and my vision behind it. By slide four of the PowerPoint that was guiding my facilitation of the day, I found a team willing to openly share their stories, with me and each other.
In our niche within the human services sector, the language we use is not only important, it’s fundamental. The words with which we describe ourselves, each other, our clients: it’s not political correctness, it reflects our process of meaning-making of our neurodivergent identities. So when I got on my little soapbox and had a rant about my feelings regarding the use of the terms ‘disorder” and ‘deficit’ in the world of ADHD and the relative failings of the “expert / patient” medical paradigm that, as neurodivergent humans, we often exasperatingly suffer through to access treatment... it went down rather well. As did my feminist musings which I covered in my previous blog here.
How many of us have participated in workshops about organisational values that left us, well…bored and unmotivated? Integrating the organisational values as they stood with the brand archetypes underpinning the business and what makes it different… now that got everyone excited.
At The Divergent Edge, we align ourselves with the following archetypes.
1. The Rebel
“We reject disordered and disabling labels of neurodivergence. We say what we think. We embrace who we are and thrive through our strengths”
2. The Sage
“Through an authentic voice, information is power for our clients; validation heals”
3. The Hero’s Journey
“Our job is to support our clients to be the hero in their story. We walk beside them as they find their personal awakening, their inspiration, and their unique EDGE.”
To be genuinely driven to make the world a better place: hour by hour, person by the person; on an interpersonal and on a systemic level. To be an agent of change in a socio-medico-political context: those are the humble drivers of our work.
As a new team we came together as individuals, and left facing the same direction, connected by passion, personal experience, and a desire to be a part of something authentic. To add value.
There were tears. There was laughter. Connection was built. Wine was served to celebrate the close of the day.
Don’t tell me you can’t build a team in a day. Yes, you have to sustain it, nurture it, challenge each other. And of course, plan the next time you’ll do it all again, but at the next level. So that we continue to grow, develop, and most importantly: Never get bored!
In a startup environment, you have to be bold, brave and prepared to switch gears using your intuition and your guts. To make quick decisions, to overthink, rethink, mess up, succeed, cry, and celebrate your wins, no matter how small.
This is only the beginning.
Dani Bultitude, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Dani is the CEO and Founder of The Divergent Edge: an innovative and unique service providing support to adults with ADHD. Through the utilisation of telehealth, access is available to the services of The Divergent Edge across Australia.
With a background in Social Work for over 20 years, Dani thrives on diversity and challenge and has worked in a variety of roles across community services, mental health, disability and education; including counsellor, mentor, trainer, clinical supervisor, and is an experienced manager and leader.
Dani has a vision to facilitate opportunities for positive change; through being prepared to be authentic, honest, and outspoken about both the benefits and challenges of being neuro-divergent. The Divergent Edge promotes and embraces their clients to channel their energies into areas of likely success; where they may have an ‘edge’, while providing support and practical assistance to overcome challenges.
Dani was diagnosed with ADHD (Predominantly hyperactive type) as an adult, which she experienced as a life changing opportunity to both understand and finally be herself. She also finally realised that building her own organisation was the thing that she was meant to do.
Dani’s Edge is her capacity to see the big picture and think strategically, through a heightened ability for abstract reasoning: or you could say, making sense of things that at first glance don’t seem connected! She is passionate about the development of psychologically safe workplaces, personal and systemic leadership, and seeking opportunities to push the boundaries of what’s possible to create meaningful change.
