As a founder, you have a lot of strong ideas, and the work done at your company is done in service of those ideas, or at the very least the one big idea that informs your mission. The team built around you is chosen for their abilities to support your vision, and every decision made has at least one eye towards that overarching goal. Many entrepreneurs choose the founder path precisely for the reason that they want to pursue their vision unencumbered by anyone but themselves, but do we need resistance and dissent to do our best work?
The collaborative process means different things to different people; for some, it’s less a team effort than a battle of wills, a contest to see who can impose their ideas upon the rest of the group. Others view it as the work of synthesizing many opinions and ideas into one cogent whole. Your view on collaboration may depend on the strength of your opinion and your need to get your way, but it’s hard to argue that working with others isn’t ultimately a net benefit to any project, which is why it’s worth considering for even the highest levels of your business.
Frustrated millennial female worker sitting at table with colleagues, felling tired of working … [+] quarreling at business meeting. Upset stressed young businesswoman suffering from head ache at office.
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We’re all guilty of falling in love with our own ideas, to the point of losing objectivity as to their merits. For many folks, there’s people around to inform them that their idea is flat-out bad, or at least requires some tinkering and iteration before it can become something workable. Sitting at the top of the org chart is a more precarious position for that particular problem. While you may have employees that offer feedback, you are just as likely to not hear honest opinions on your ideas from people afraid to offend the boss. One has to wonder how many terrible ideas have been fully implemented simply because no one was able or willing to point out flaws.
Likely perpetuating this problem is the romanticized idea of the singular genius, who guides his or her company to unimagined success. We’ve all read enough about those companies to believe that we need to do our own imitation of that act, or at least adopt the notion that we cannot fail, but only be failed by those around us. The simple truth is that we’re not geniuses — those people are like unicorn companies, few and far between. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t be successful, so long as we remember we don’t know everything, and that everything to come out of our mouth or fall out of our brain isn’t solid gold.
Truly working with others means being willing to give and take as necessary for the greater good of the project at hand. Anyone can ground others into submission until they agree that your idea is the superior one, particularly if you’re in charge. But it takes a genuine dedication to the idea itself, rather than your own ego, to allow others to tweak and alter your idea into something that will ultimately be better for the multiple perspectives brought to bear upon it. Even if you have genuine confidence in the brilliance of your idea, the added scrutiny will do nothing to diminish it; rather, you will feel that much more confident for having won over team members you respect and trust.
Collaboration has to be something that is an ongoing process as well. There’s nothing like success to make you lose sight of ideals you once held fast to, and success can breed confidence that elides the contribution of others if you allow it to. And our natural tendencies will lead us towards working on our own things and shielding them from outside influences — that’s part of the reason many of us started our own businesses, after all. That’s why we have to make a conscious effort to bring others into our work to ensure the best ideas win out.
No one especially likes having their ideas probed and dissected by others; for some, it can feel like a blow to their pride and ego to hear a critique of what you’ve worked hard on, and for that reason many people either don’t work collaboratively or don’t contribute their ideas towards a group project. But every effort and every company is better for the many and varied voices that offer their own unique perspective that might not have been considered otherwise, or their own particular brilliance that makes a good thing even better. Working together on crafting ideas, and not just in implementing them, ensures that you’re getting the best outcome for you and our company. #onwards.
Source by www.forbes.com
