درسنامه صوتی

Collaborate – Audio

Hi, welcome to this month’s topic, collaborate.

How can you be more creative and successful? Seems like that’s the basic question we ask every month and we’re just giving you, ideas. I’m just giving you little ideas to try. Each month something new to try out in your own life. Some of them will work very well for you, some maybe less well, but I encourage you to try them all, because some of them are going to really help you.

This month is a very interesting one. It’s something that goes in little different direction. This month we’re really focused on the word synergy or the idea of synergy. On one hand I hate this word, because corporations have taken this word and have used it all the time. It’s a buzzword, a corporate buzzword. (A buzzword is something that is very popular, kind of a trendy word). Corporations love to use this word, synergy, synergy, synergy and they use it so much that it has almost lost its meaning.

We’re going to focus on the original meaning of the word and the basic idea of it and how you can use it in your own life. Synergy simply means that the sum, the whole of something is greater than its parts. You could think of this idea as a formula, 1+1=3, which logically isn’t true, mathematically isn’t true, but it gives the idea of what we’re talking about. That you have the two parts, one and one and when you combine them together they create something even greater than just the addition of the two things.

One of my favorite examples of this, because I’m an old Beatles fan is the songwriting duo of John Lennon and Paul McCartney. If anyone knows the Beatles, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and the other two as well, but especially Lennon and McCartney, wrote most of the great songs, sometimes together, but they were always working together in some way. Many critics of rock n’ roll and pop music consider Lennon and McCartney to be the greatest rock songwriters of all time. If not the greatest, than certainly right at the top.

So together they were amazing. They did incredible things. They had a run, meaning a time period of incredible creativity and productivity. They wrote hit after hit, incredible album after incredible album. They were right at the top while they were together. Of course, the Beatles split up then and John Lennon and Paul McCartney went on to have solo careers. They continued writing songs and continued performing. And they were still good, quite good in fact. They were both excellent musicians.

But most people agree, and I certainly personally agree that they were never quite as good by themselves. That Paul McCartney, although good, was never quite as good as he was when he was with John Lennon and the same was true of John Lennon. This is that synergy idea, that while the two pieces were very good together, there was something magical, something great that happened through working together. This is the magic of collaboration.

We create that magic with other people. You can do great things by yourself, certainly, and some people naturally seem to work best alone. But you have to find this out for yourself and it’s very useful to try collaborating with others. (To collaborate means to work with others). In order to collaborate, first of all, we need complementary partners for teams. You can have whole teams it doesn’t have to be just two people, you might have a whole team of five, ten, twenty or whatever, but it’s best with collaboration to have people that complement you, not people who are exactly the same.

This is an important idea when working with other peoples and when building a team or a partnership. So let’s look again at Paul McCartney and John Lennon and even George Harrison and the Beatles. They were very different. Their personalities were very different. Paul McCartney was sort of the happy optimistic one, very cheerful and John Lennon was ornery, mischievous and somewhat sarcastic and together they were magical, because they had these two very different approaches, two different personalities and combining those two things was very interesting and much more interesting than when they were by themselves.

So they complemented each other, they helped each other. Things that Lennon, maybe was more weak at, McCartney was strong at and vice versa. McCartney was a certain way, Lennon was different and when they skillfully worked together it was magical. This is true for most teams. It’s the same in sports, on a sports team, every player doesn’t usually have the same athletic abilities. Depending on their position on the team, some might be bigger and stronger and maybe slower, while others might be smaller and faster. There can be a whole range of different athletic abilities and talents, and they work best when they complement each other. Then they work together creative.

If you just had everyone on the team who is exactly the same it just doesn’t work as well. Now for this to work, team members need to have mutual respect. There needs to be communication and trust. Again, if we look at the Beatles example, even though they had this magical partnership or collaboration that made them the greatest band in the world, at that time, they essentially broke up. That partnership was destroyed because they lost their mutual respect. They lost their ability to communicate. They lost their trust in one another and so they broke apart.

So developing communication abilities is very important. That means…

Number one is to compromise in order to make each other better and to make the team better.

So when you have two or more people with different skills, different ideas, naturally there are going to be clashes sometimes. When you are working with another person or other people, you’re not always going to agree and so this is a tough situation. It’s always challenging, you have to be able to step back, calm yourself down and look at

the big picture, look at the whole project that you’re working on. Look at the whole team.

You must be able to see what’s best for the project, what is best for the team, and sometimes that means the other person’s ideas are better. Even though you love your idea, you need to be able to look at the whole thing and be able to let go. So there’s a bit of egoless-ness that works best when you collaborate with other people.

Another way of saying that is compromise. You have to be able to compromise. Sometimes you have to let go of your ideas and other times other people need to do it. It doesn’t work if one person’s always or usually getting their way and the other people are not. Collaboration and compromise need to happen for the good of the whole project, not for one person’s ego, because if you’re compromising just because the other person is stronger or more forceful than you are, not because you think it’s best for the team, then again, the end product, the end result will not be so great.

Let’s talk about specifically, what you can do this month.

I want you to start a collaborative project. Focus first on your area of strength, on your area of influence. We’ve discussed this idea in the past. So choose, maybe this is in your career or some hobby you have, doesn’t matter, but choose something you’re already good at, one of your strengths. Find another person to work with, at least one, maybe more. Recruit one or more team members.

This is an important phase, an important step in the collaboration process. This will probably make or break the success of your collaboration, choosing the right people.

1.They need to be people you trust and respect.

2. People you can communicate with, that you have a decent relationship with where you can talk openly without constantly getting upset.

3. They complement your strengths.

You have to know yourself, know what you’re good at, know what you’re not good at and choose people who are good at the things that you are not, and vice versa, then you work together very well.

• The next step is to create something together, a project, something clear, tangible.

It might be a product. It might be a campaign if this is for work, a marketing campaign. I don’t know what it is because you have your own fields, so you know what it is. Choose something specific that has a start and an end point, a specific project that you’ll work on together. It might be small, it might be large, I don’t know, you decide.

• As a final step, get feedback.

After you finish your project, take a break and get away from it and then come back with your partner(s) and review the project together. Decide what did you do well? What worked? What didn’t? Look at it impartially if you can, as an outsider. Don’t worry about critiquing each other, but rather, the project as a whole, because that’ll help you decide how to work better together in the future. And if you can bring in other people, other outsiders and have them review your project as well.

If your project is something that actually will get thrown out into the real world, like a product for example, then you’re going to get great feedback from that because it’ll sell or it won’t for example, with a product or a marketing campaign it will be successful or it won’t. You’ll have measurements for that and that’s great feedback too.

We could call this the Hollywood Model, because this increasingly, I think, is the direction that many fields, many companies, many jobs are going. In the past we have this idea of again, where you’re working at a company and then everything happens within the company. This again was the old idea, that old IBM idea that I think of that my dad had when he worked at IBM. They pretty much did most of their projects within the company and they worked with the same people all the time, and that was fine. But, what I find now is happening in many, many, many different fields is something that’s a little closer to Hollywood.

Think about how a movie gets made. Of course, a big Hollywood movie has a huge team of people, but let’s focus on the core people on that team. You have the producer, the director, the main actors and the writer and what they do is they all come together around one project. They’re all working on one movie and they work together on that movie, it gets launched, boom it goes out there. It’s successful or it’s not and then what happens? The team breaks apart and they move on to other projects.

Then on the next project it’s typically not exactly the same team. It might be the same director, but that same director might pull in a different writer, usually will. Might have a different producer(s), will use different actors. They may have favorite people they like working with that will work with them again and again, but the teams typically are different on each project. You can think this way as well. You can use the same idea in your own career.

So, instead of thinking in terms of your department or your job, think in terms of projects. Have a project-centric focus. That’s where you decide, okay I think this is good for the company or this is good for my career. We’re going to do this project. Now who are the best people for this project? You go recruit those people. You work on that project and then you finish it. Then, once it’s done you identify your next project and then you recruit another team for that one.

You might have some of the same people, especially if you work really well with certain people, but you’re probably going to bring in other people as well, who are better for that second project. And then you just go from project to project to project, so instead of being stuck in a department working for the same people and working with the same people all the time it’s more fluid. It’s a little more like a Hollywood movie and you’re just making movie after movie. Instead of movies you’re doing project after project in your job, in your career and you can ignore the departmental lines within a company and just recruit people from all over the company or even from outside the company.

You can try this at work or even try it at home again, with a hobby or something that you really love and are interested in.

I’ll end this with a story of my own, a project I have called ‘Learn Real English’, which is a whole different company. I started that company with my friends, Kristen and Joe. It’s a collaborative process. It’s very different than Effortless English, which is just me, or mostly me. And in that company they’re my two best friends, so we automatically have that trust and openness. We easily can communicate with each other and yet, there are struggles. I’ve seen some of the challenges of collaboration and the rewards.

On one hand it can be quite tough. Joe and I, in particular, are very different. I’m a big picture type of person and Joe loves details. I get frustrated and bored with little individual technical details, like online stuff, computer things and Joe has a computer programming background and he’s really good at that.

So many times Joe and I clash. We have these disagreements constantly about which direction should the business go and what projects should we do next? That can be challenging and frustrating. On the other hand, because we have complementary skills things can also work much better in this partnership, in this group, because if we have a technical problem, for example. When I’m by myself it’s really overwhelming for me, but with Learn Real English I can just call Joe and say Joe, something is happening with the website and he jumps in and figures out what’s happening.

And over time we have figured out what I do best, what he does best and what Kristen does best. We’ve learned how to communicate with each other and so now we work very well with each other, it’s a great experience and we produce some great projects as a result. You can do this too. You can do this in a professional setting or you can just go and work with friends on different things, it’s up to you.

But your task, your homework that I encourage you to do this month is to find a team, build a team around a specific project and then tell us the results. We’ll talk more about this in the commentary. Until then, have a great day. Bye.