How you come together so you don’t immediately fall apart
This week I did multiple posts about separation and I would like to pair that with a post about what it looks like to come together in a healthy way.
Thing is, we are so excited when we meet people who have a similar vision to us that we jump in super grateful, for finding them. Much like romantic relationships — these kind of professional and community relationships get carried away with romance. We imagine we have finally found someone to be in the foxhole with and we love the propulsive energy of that.
I find in these moments we really need to do work together to understand 3 things.
1) What parts of this issue/company do we actually not have the same beliefs about — if you have the same beliefs about all of it — you haven’t searched enough.
2) What kinds of styles of work are important to us? Do I work off checklists, do I work off a strategy faithfully, do I do well with email or text? What do we believe is the most effective way of getting work done?
3) How does each of us handle conflict and what will it look like when we are in conflict?
These three questions should lead you to this answer: What tradeoffs am I making by not doing this alone? What makes this partnership worth these tradeoffs.
Often when I start to see the wheels fall off the car is folks never reckon with what it means to be making tradeoffs on how you would do something alone and what it means to do something with others. Our major hurts transition to harms when we struggle to admit the tradeoffs we willingly made when the joy was high that we are no longer willing to make when the rush of camaraderie diminishes.
In truth, I believe even we are being employed, we should be evaluating what tradeoffs we are making and what makes those tradeoffs worth it. This way we can contextualize when we are in dysfunctional professional codependency where we are more energized by trying to change a person or institution than the institution itself.
