I’ve talked a lot about team building and delegation and now that you’ve probably got a handle on it, I’d like to include the essential missing pieces.
Trust and Mutual Respect.
I’ve waited until now to talk about these intangibles because I like to be the guy who puts in the last puzzle pieces. I know, it’s a jerk move. I’m still a work in progress.
So, trust and mutual respect.
You can outfit yourself with all the very best processes to become more productive, to scale up or down, whatever your model. But you can’t buy trust and mutual respect. You have to cultivate those qualities, and it must start with you.
In other words, if you want self-esteem, you have to do esteemable things.
The more esteemable acts I perform, the stronger I feel and the more attracted I become to others who are on the same path. It’s taken a long time to become a good judge of character and it has been directly proportional to the kind of character I continue to develop inside.
We must, as founders, respect the individual gifts each member of the team brings to the mix. Instead of being suspicious or envious or befuddled by them, we need to embrace and learn from each person’s unique qualities.
Relinquish your ego’s desire to take credit for others. Give credit where it is due and never, ever imagine that you are the smartest person in the room.
The paradox here is that once you have established this level of detachment, you can begin to trust and once you begin to trust, you can do anything, absolutely anything. Sometimes, this process takes years, and sometimes you just know.
Still, I marvel at what technology can do for us. I’m always curious about advancement and how being replaced by technology is not the end of human life, it is the beginning. It frees us to explore the endless possibilities of the human spirit.
So my team is small, wildly eccentric, and completely isolated from one another. But we are connected by a trust born out of mutual respect for one another’s badass talents.
My relationship with them and the bond they have formed with each other can’t be memorialized in a 400-page contract. There’s no algorithm for it. It is the product of authenticity and transparency.
There’s no computer in the world that can get excited about the possibility of something new, only humans can do that, and that’s amazing.
