“Collaboration is the best way to work. It’s the only way to work, really. Everyone’s there because they have a set of skills to offer across the board.”
– Antony Starr
Leaving egos Behind in Business
“Your ego can become an obstacle to your work. If you start believing in your greatness, it is the death of your creativity.”
– Marina Abramovic
Moving into the new age of business management and development requires a new approach – high end collaboration, nimbleness, flexibility. It takes making maximum use of all communication opportunities inside, outside, and between everyone with a vested in your organization.
As a leader, it means checking your ego at the door. This takes growing enough personally to accept that we, individually, do not have all the answers.
When we begin a business, grow as a business, or innovate within an organization, we are taking risks. It means we have to have enough ego to take the risk, the bruises, the challenges and the barriers that inevitably come up.
The big problem in many cases occurs when we then fail to monitor the ego we’ve developed, fail to ensure it is not getting in the way of hearing and seeing what is before us and around us, or acknowledge that we do not hold all the keys.
Growing Collaboration
“Collaboration is the best way to work. It’s the only way to work, really. Everyone’s there because they have a set of skills to offer across the board.”
– Antony Starr
Our new job as executives in this constantly changing environment, is to nurture, guide, and encourage our relationships with those around us, and pay attention to those involved in our business – from the executive suite to the front lines, to the advisors at the bank, to the subcontractors and suppliers on whom we depend. This requires emotional intelligence – growing in relationships.
Our intent needs to be refocused. We need to seek contributions – ideas, critiques, identified problems or barriers to service or production, and information from all around us – regardless of the position they hold. This is the fastest road to building a successful business in today’s fast moving environment.
Building these connections and relationships, although not as easy as it might sound, has the potential of producing major benefits for us, and definitely, for our companies. It does not matter what our line of business is, we have a brave new world happening here. We cannot succeed alone.
Engineering Communication
“Technology gives us power, but it does not and cannot tell us how to use that power. Thanks to technology, we can instantly communicate across the world, but it still doesn’t help us know what to say.”
– Jonathon Sacks
Technology is changing our world daily, by leaps and bounds.
Communication on all fronts is becoming both simpler and more complex at the same time. Think talking phones, Siri, Alexa, Evernote, Instagram, Snapchat, Drop Box, Air Drop, the Cloud, and the multiple communication systems being developed by software companies almost daily. How do these advances impact your business? How can you use them, or catch up to them in business? How do they impact you personally?
And still, face-to-face human interaction tops the list of ways to grow. Talk to other business people who seem to be moving ahead of the crowd and succeeding. Call them up and offer them coffee. Share ideas. Talk with your employees, your family, and your customers about what is important to them. Develop communication systems that work inside and outside your organization.
Gaining Business Success
What you read here is, I hope, a wakeup call that inspires you take the time to step back, reflect, and rethink your processes.
I encourage you to read, read, read. Get up an hour earlier and surf the net for business news in magazine, ezines, e letters from multiple sources in the fields that affect your business, and new books that are being published weekly.
If you are a speed-reader, this is not an issue. If you are not, it is. Keeping up with the changes is a challenge these days. But taking the time to do it will make a difference to how you move forward.
- Cruise Amazon books to find titles that you can investigate and purchase.
- Go to your local library and/or subscribe to their online book loan system. Use your local librarian.
- Join a business group such as the Chamber of Commerce, or Kinsmen; interact with other local business people.
- Hire a coach whose skill lies in facilitating and guiding your best business ideas and practices rather than an expert who tells you what to do and how to do it.
- Find a mentor with experience in business.
Bottom line: Explore all the sources of information available to you. Take advantage of every source any way you can.
We have to admit we can’t keep up. We have to leave the ego behind, and aim for high-end collaboration.
Then we have to find a way to not just get the info we need, but implement whatever we have learned, in order to proceed and succeed.
Step up! Shed the chains of doing and being all to your business.
Ditch the ego! Jump into collaboration! Network!!! Network!! Network!
The autocrat in business is out. The leader/collaborator is in.
