Going it together

One of the big trends I’m seeing all around me these days are people who are tired of going it alone. Successful solo-entrepreneurs, who have made names and careers for themselves, who are simply fed up with being alone, tired from years and years of hard work wearing all the hats.

And I think the time is right for people like us to start to team up. A lot more than we have in the past.

Great things tends to require many different skills, and it’s very hard to do really great work if we’re not building a team to carry it out.

There are two things that I see as being critical in order for this to work.

One, you must know yourself. If your self-image is inaccurate - whether your image of yourself is better or worse or just different from reality - an inaccurate self-image is going to make it really hard to connect and work with the people you really need to work with.

How are they going to see your greatest talents and gifts if you don’t? How are you going to bring them in play, if you don’t know what they are? How are you going to find people to complement you, if you don’t value what you have, and trust enough in yourself to let others contribute where you’re weak?

Two, when you work together as a team, it can’t just be your vision, it has to be a shared vision. In the last century, you had the org chart. The boss has the master plan, and people are just cogs in the machine that carry out the plan. In this century, which is about creativity and innovation and emotional labor, everyone needs to be plugged in to a shared higher vision.

I like to think of it as MIT professor Otto Scharmer’s “future that wants to emerge”. Whether you realize or not, you tap into a future that wants to emerge through you. It’s not something you come up with, it’s something you sense into, through your heart and intuition. And so do the rest of the team. And because this is something bigger than yourself, and something outside of yourself, it can easily become a shared vision, for everyone else who has the ability to sense into these things, which happens to be most of us, given the right circumstances and support.

It does require that you as a leader push your ego aside and see yourself as being in service to that higher vision. And that’s always a great thing for a leader to do.

Without these two elements in place, it’s going to be difficult to get the right teams working on the right missions.

With these elements in place, it’s so much easier. Things seem to align themselves automatically. You’re one with life. In flow. You allow yourself to be exactly as you are, letting the ego step aside for a moment, and you allow others to do the same. You allow these others to see you as you are, and you see them as they are. You connect not around your egos, but around the higher vision that you sense together.

In a future post I’ll talk about how you can actually do the step of sensing into the “future that wants to emerge”.

What are YOU experiencing right now? Are you also fed up with being alone? Do you have experiences with an inaccurate self-image being corrected, and what were the consequences? Have you had experiences with shared visions?

Please share with me in the comments!

Thanks!