Collaboration – Life Lessons From a Sandbox

Collaboration, teamwork, empowered teams ….

Buzzwords that we like to throw around, brag about, lay claim to and espouse as our personal mantra when telling others the “secret to our success”.

Collaboration was on my mind as I watched a group of kids playing in a sandbox and as I observed their behaviors, it occurred to me that it may be possible to predict tomorrow’s collaborators just by observing these young people.

The kids fell into a variety of different groups.

The “Results and Fun” Group

The kids who were focused on having fun and accomplishing the desired result.  They mattered to each other.  Ego wasn’t important.  They represented human creativity and collaboration at its best.

The “My Way is the Best Way” Group

They struggled with whose idea was best.  During the fighting, some would start to cry and leave the group.  Some left in anger.  Some left in boredom when they realized their contribution didn’t matter.

Some stayed anyway, contributed for a bit and then suddenly kicked the castle down because they never liked it anyway – their idea was much better.

The “My Way is the Only Way” Group of One

One kid was building castles by himself.  It didn’t take very long to figure out why.  Every time another kid showed up to help, the first kid would say “I want you to do this or that”.  When the new child would offer a new idea, it was promptly rejected.  Some kids were more stubborn than others in pressing their point of view but eventually, the stubbornness of the one kid was too much and the others left.

The “If I Wanted  Your Opinion I’d Give it to You” Group

One kid who struggled with his castle asked others who were successful for help and when they told him what he was doing wrong, he told them they were wrong.  The kid went back to his castle, got angry and stomped on it, walking away from it.  He was frustrated with failure, not realizing that he was the cause of it.

The “Teamwork in Name Only” Group

One group of interest built a decent little sand castle and the parents were called over to admire it.  One kid prattled on and on about “the best castle in the park that he built”.  I’m sure the hearts of the other kids sank as they listened to him – the potential for a collaborative spirit being torn out of them by one person seizing the rewards. 

The “Non-Creative Way is Safest” Group

This is the group who constantly turned down one kid’s creative contributions with responses like “if we do that, it will fall down anyway so we won’t do it”.  The new kid offered a few suggestions as to why that wouldn’t happen and then walked away to play on the swings.  The potential for a great castle died because the strongest personality in the group didn’t like the idea.

The “I Don’t Like Any Of Your Ways” Group

This group was the saddest group of all.  They in fact were not building anything in the sand.  However, they took delight in occasionally running through the sandbox, destroying everyone else’s work.

They had no intention of creating anything.  Maybe they felt they couldn’t.  I don’t know.  All I know is that they didn’t want anyone else to create anything either.

Looking In My Own Sandbox

The sandbox was in fact a microcosm of the world I have been a part of for a long time.

We have all seen failures that fall into one of these groups – the leader who would not share credit but preferred the glory, the leader who delegated all the blame, the bully who crushed creativity and contribution, the leader who only liked their own ideas and nobody else’s or the leader who seemed to exist to take the wind out of the sails of others, crushing their projects and dreams without offering a contribution of his / her own.

The people who failed missed the key ingredient that the first group I described knew all along.

The first group knew that we need each other.

That our collective ideas are stronger than single ideas.

That focusing on our result and not on our ego produces a better result.

That sharing the credit encourages us to continue to work together on new projects and assures us that others will stick around to help us with the next sand castle.

That embracing team creativity takes all of us further than if we chose to follow our own ideas only.

Maybe the next time a team is looking for a consultant to help them solve their collaboration problems, maybe we should pay a bunch of kids $1000 a day to allow us to sit and observe them.

They will not offer us “stuff” to please our ego or to tell us what we want to hear.  They will not offer advice influenced by their own life experiences which may be empowering or disempowering.

They will just be themselves and in doing so, place staggeringly profound lessons in front of us.

If we are open to those lessons, it may be the most authentic lessons we will ever learn, lessons that are placed in front of us with no ulterior motive.

Aren’t they the most profound lessons of all?

I wish you well with your own “sand castles”.

Yours in service and servanthood.

Harry

For my detailed blog “Collaboration – Life Lessons From a Sandbox”, please click here.