The following is a guest piece by Fast Company contributor Faisal Hoque.
It doesn’t matter what we do, where we do it, or how well we create a product or offer a service. We don’t succeed without the right people on our teams.
I have come to believe that to survive and ultimately thrive we must effectively create “partnerships” with many around us, from family to colleagues to society in general.
Here are five fundamental principles I have learned to build better partnerships with others:
1. Be direct
Direct communication leads to direction, the path you set as a leader. Even if it was possible, nobody wants to follow a muddled message. Every word must be deliberate and directed. Don’t be tempted to reach out without direction because that can deter or even destroy your overall agenda.
If you can’t say something clearly and directly, wait until you can articulate it to yourself. Talk may be cheap, but it can be worthless if uttered without direction and even cost you a client, a deal, or your whole business. A direct message is priceless: as E. B. White writes in the timeless Elements of Style: Every word must tell.
2. Think ahead
No matter how successful you are, you won’t continue on that golden path if you stop anticipating what’s next, which is a job too big to do on your own. You need to surround yourself with forward thinkers. Make sure your people are ready for changes, even the most unprecedented challenges.
Changes are constant. Since you can know that what you’re doing today will be wrong tomorrow, you need to forge trusting, resilient teams, a constellation of partnerships.
3. Inspire and influence
The most successful leaders are able to inspire and influence everyone: their executive team, employees, customers, clients, partners, investors, and many others. Inspiration cannot happen without clear communication. You have to show people you’re a person too.
Success can quickly inflate egos to the point of isolation of leadership and alienation of those who are most critical to your ongoing ability to survive and thrive. The best and brightest will be toppled if they can’t inspire others. It takes a dynamic person with a positive, honest, forward-looking attitude to inspire and influence the people involved in building and growing enterprises and communities.
4. Create a community
Like any community, a healthy ecosystem must be nurtured to achieve continual success. A sustainable ecosystem is the structure you form around yourself. Those interconnections allow you to bring in individuals and groups, exposing you and your team to ideas and perspectives you wouldn’t have encountered otherwise, allowing for cross-pollination.
5. Think long term
Although it may feel counterintuitive, to thrive within a volatile world, leaders must be aware of the present moment while simultaneously setting their sights on long-term goals: purpose must be a part of the present. Since value creation is qualitative as well as quantitative, no metric can completely capture success.
Volatility isn’t to be avoided, it’s to be cooperated with. Which requires the resilience provided by mindfulness, and the buoyancy provided by partnership.
It doesn’t matter how smart or savvy we are when it comes to technology, product development or any single skill. Nobody succeeds in a silo. Whatever we venture – personal, professional, philanthropic, political, or private – we must remember the people involved in and essential to our success.
Learn from our own mistakes and mastery, and learn from the people around us: those we admire now and those we may learn from just by listening. We never know whom we may inspire or influence, or who may inspire and influence us. Today’s stranger may be tomorrow’s partner.
Faisal Hoque is the founder of Shadoka and other companies. He’s also a regular contributor to Fast Company and The Huffington Post. He is the author of several books, his latest being “>Everything Connects — How to Transform and Lead in the Age of Creativity, Innovation and Sustainability”. To learn more about Faisal, visit his website: www.faisalhoque.com. You can also follow him on Twitter: @faisal_hoque.
*Excerpted with permission from Everything Connects: How To Transform And Lead In The Age Of Creativity, Innovation And Sustainability (McGraw Hill, 2014) by Faisal Hoque with Drake Baer. Copyright (c) 2014 by Faisal Hoque. All rights reserved.
Good stuff Tanveer, but how many leaders out there are truly walking the talk. You said it best: "Nobody succeeds in a silo" yet compared to ten years ago, I am observing more silos. Why?
Re: Community – I was watching my Japanese channel the other day and I viewed a program where the President of a ship building yard cooked lunch for his employees once a week. Now that is community.
Hi Jimmy,
Based on my work and observations, the growth of more silos comes down to two factors – the first one being the fact that we're trying to get more done with more data and more communication channels than we ever had before. This naturally creates these barriers as people both struggle to keep their grounding as well as protect their turf against the unknown brought about by this cycle of seemingly perpetual change.
The second issue is the fact that because we're trying to squeeze more out of our day, we have less time to listen, reflect and review (there was a study done last year that found a growing number of executives now sleep with their smartphones because they're stressed about falling out of the loop).
What this creates is a greater chasm between how we view our leadership and how those around us experience it. I've seen first-hand how many leaders can't seem to get past their own perception of what they do and the value they think they're creating and what those they lead see them doing and the huge gap between them.
It's an issue that will be a focal point of mine in the upcoming months as I really do see this as being a key issue for leaders of all stripes.
Could it be that the tendency towards silos is down to organizations trying to solve new problems the old way? As the pace of business increases, the old structured approaches will no longer work, but organizations still turn to them out of habit. Some organizations are aiming for more collaborative working, more partnerships and looser structures. My guess is that these companies are the ones that will succeed in the long run.