Team > Individual

Hey 🙂

I keep coming back to this thought. It’s become such an important idea that I write it down almost every day, to remind myself to do the right thing: prioritise team performance over individual performance.

It’s a reminder of what my job actually is — to help other people do their best work, to work through people, and not be the default person to say “I’ll do that,” but to say “who’s the best person to do that?”

I try to spend my time thinking clearly about what the core problems and challenges are in the business, and who might be the best person to help fix them, before I default to jumping in and do it myself.

Over the last couple of months there’s been an uptick in everybody in the company working on solutions to problems. But there’s also been an uptick, from my side, in doing more to help people know what the most important thing is to work on right now.

I made a goal that everybody has at least one business development project they’re working on, linked directly to a problem or challenge in the business. I can spend the majority of my time on what needs to be done and why, and help someone else figure out how to get it done. Not jump in and solve it myself. Let people figure it out, and do the hard work around it.

My mission since partnering with the co-founders at The Question First Group has been: what do I need to do to be a world-class collaborator? That question keeps getting more important. And this is where it’s landed: as owners, the important thing is to prioritise team performance over individual performance. Are we making decisions and choices that create a high-performing team, not just a single high-performing individual? Are we making decisions that benefit the whole company and the whole team, or decisions that only benefit the individual?

So, a few questions I’ll leave here to ponder:

What do you need to do to be a great collaborator? Are you helping your team do their best work? Are you deliberately working on the skills required to work through other people? Are you creating projects that solve real problems in the business, and then finding the right person to deliver them?

🗣️ 👀

Chris.