As I grow older I realise, more acutely so recently, that for many years, since I started to work, I've been going solo in my profession (and in life more generally).
I can see that this is the result of my temperament and certain life experience in my childhood and teenage years. As I reflect on my professional failures, such as not being able to implement an online language programme at university while I was based in Mexico, I realise that a significant contributing factor was my lonely approach to work, a one-man-show attitude that caused me significant suffering and the incipient programme, in this case, its life.
There are a couple of anecdotes that have shed much needed clarity for me on this. A few weeks ago I was helping my wife to apply to a job with one of the big retailers in the UK. I was simply translating the questions from English to Spanish as we went through the required online tests pre-interview, to make sure that she was understanding properly. I couldn't help commenting on some the questions and the options that I would choose, certainly influencing my wife to some extent.
When we finished and were told that she had failed the tests, the automated feedback that we received revealed that my individualistic, goal-oriented approach to work was largely to blame. Consistently, she would choose to collaborate with others, ask for help and offer help whereas I thought getting on with the work on my own was the best option.
The other critical incident relates to a time about a couple of years ago when I helped my sister-in-law to move house. She could only afford to pay for one person using a small pick-up truck, which meant we had to work all day doing countless trips taking furniture and other stuff from the old to the new house. For the whole day, I was struck by the way the removals person kept asking us again and again for our opinion when we had to make choices about how much more furniture to load, how to position it, tie it, protect it... He was clearly the expert there, having done hundreds of removals before, but that did not stop him from getting us involved and letting us make the decisions.
I have since tried to emulate his style when I work on something with others and the refreshing reflection I take from it is that the process and the results are much more satisfactory... and failures less likely and painful.
Going solo
As I grow older I realise, more acutely so recently, that for many years, since I started to work, I've been going solo in my profession (and in life more generally).
I can see that this is the result of my temperament and certain life experience in my childhood and teenage years. As I reflect on my professional failures, such as not being able to implement an online language programme at university while I was based in Mexico, I realise that a significant contributing factor was my lonely approach to work, a one-man-show attitude that caused me significant suffering and the incipient programme, in this case, its life.
There are a couple of anecdotes that have shed much needed clarity for me on this. A few weeks ago I was helping my wife to apply to a job with one of the big retailers in the UK. I was simply translating the questions from English to Spanish as we went through the required online tests pre-interview, to make sure that she was understanding properly. I couldn't help commenting on some the questions and the options that I would choose, certainly influencing my wife to some extent.
When we finished and were told that she had failed the tests, the automated feedback that we received revealed that my individualistic, goal-oriented approach to work was largely to blame. Consistently, she would choose to collaborate with others, ask for help and offer help whereas I thought getting on with the work on my own was the best option.
The other critical incident relates to a time about a couple of years ago when I helped my sister-in-law to move house. She could only afford to pay for one person using a small pick-up truck, which meant we had to work all day doing countless trips taking furniture and other stuff from the old to the new house. For the whole day, I was struck by the way the removals person kept asking us again and again for our opinion when we had to make choices about how much more furniture to load, how to position it, tie it, protect it... He was clearly the expert there, having done hundreds of removals before, but that did not stop him from getting us involved and letting us make the decisions.
I have since tried to emulate his style when I work on something with others and the refreshing reflection I take from it is that the process and the results are much more satisfactory... and failures less likely and painful.