Team
Work
“Great
things in business are never done by one person. They're done by a
team.”
Steve Jobs
Just as our bodies require many cells, many systems, many organs all working together to function properly,
hardly anything great is accomplished by one person alone. Take
Steve Jobs, for instance: his company began in his parents garage
when he was a teenager, and if he hadn't had the help of Steve
Wozniak he might never have gotten out of that garage. It is well
known that beginning in 1933, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Hugo Dyson,
and Charles Williams, all members of The Inklings Writers Club at
Oxford, met together every Thursday evening in Lewis's rooms to
discuss their manuscripts and glean ideas from one another. Most
psychotherapists belong to a supervision group in which they present
challenging clients to get advice and support from other therapists.
Physicians present grand-rounds to announce new treatments and
findings, and to solicit pertinent questions and information from their peers.
None of us operates in a vacuum.
Team work is as essential
in life as in business. We need the support of other people to
celebrate our successes, acknowledge our losses, suffer our defeats,
and stand with us in good times and in bad. When we don't have a
network of support, we feel stressed, anxious and sometimes even
depressed. One key factor in gathering a team is to admit your need
and desire for help. If we don't ask for help, it likely won't simply
materialize out of thin air. Many of us feel that asking for
assistance is a sign of weakness, when the truth is, it's just the
opposite. It takes intelligence and self-knowledge to know when you
need help, and courage to ask for it.
Human beings are not
meant to be solitary animals—we're tribal in nature, and even in
this modern world, we need each other. Gather your team around you
today and be sure to tell them how much you appreciate them. In the
words of former basketball player and coach, Phil Jackson, “The
strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each
member is the team.”
In the Spirit,
Jane
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