Leadership by the Cup: The Power of "Together"

Thank you, Yogi Tea, for giving me blogging fodder.

Yes, I'm still drinking my super green tea, and its a good thing, too. Yogi Tea keeps dishing out poignant leadership fortunes, one tag at a time. 

So that's how tagging started?!

Anyway, this latest cup said, 

"Together we can do what we can never do alone."

It's hard to argue with this one. Yes, in my younger and more salad days I remember feeling that it was easier to work alone but since 2010 when I really started to have the privilege and opportunities to work with well-run teams and committees, my thinking did a complete 180 and now the only things I work on alone are requests for statistics and monthly reports from my boss. So much else of what I do is people-centered and team oriented, and those other things are way more fun than churning out statistics and chronicling what I do on a month-by-month basis. 

Any thoughts on how I can turn stats and monthly reports into a team sport?

I suppose if I could talk to Julie 2.0 (I'm currently on version 3.1) would have pointed out that the apparent ease of working alone 1) is just a figment of my imagination and ego, and 2) does not correlate with effectiveness. Just think of how much more effect I could have had if I had taken a more team-oriented approach! 

In fact, it's hard to open any book that's even remotely about leadership and not find pages - if not the whole book - dedicated to the importance of working with people. Some examples:

- Seth Godin and his book on Tribes. 

- Chip and Dan Heath and their book, Switch

- Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs

- Guy Kawasaki's book, Enchantment

- Dan Pink and his book, To sell is human

Bottom line: we are human and in order to make better: change, progress, improvements, whatever you want to call it, we gotta work with other humans. And that's a good thing! Other people are at least as interesting and creative as we are, if not more so, and they help to provide a higher level of interestingness (i think Flickr coined this term a few years ago) to any project. 

I suppose one could argue that in order to make worse we need other people, too. As I heard in the first day of the leadership institute, it's all about balance. And values. And self awareness. And vision. If those four quadrants are aligned (or misaligned, as it were) with unhealthy and negative intentions, we  make worse. If they're aligned with healthy and positive intentions, we make better. 

So, go! Do! And make better!