Complimentary Strengths Flashcards
The key to achieving success is not trying to be someone else or striving to be as good as your collaborator at whatever he does best were seeking to be universally proficient. It is in discovering your own exceptional abilities, recognizing your weaknesses, and understanding how someone else’s abilities complement your own.
A successful collaborator must resist the ego gratifying temptation to take too much credit.
A collaboration combines oxygen with acetylene.
In other words, it creates a flame that is far harder than a conventional fire.
Create a chemistry, mutual respect, an eerie coordination that accomplishes much.
The real glue in a relationship is understanding how much each one needs the other.
Being a polymath is a myth.
The pressure to be all things to all people is pervasive. But doing just a few things exceptionally well is a better path to success than spreading yourself family across dozens of disciplines, becoming, as they say, and an apprentice of everything but a master of nothing.
The flipside of this phenomenon is that people who excel at a task often think their work is exceptional.
They take for granted what comes naturally to them, assuming that others can perform the task just as well.
We work well together, because we are different.
Michael Eisner and Frank Wells – – we’re like right and left arms – – one creative, impulsive, irreverent. The other measured, practical, decisive.
Eisner rubbed people the wrong way. He fussed over the details. He was suspicious of others motives and he didn’t trust many people. He had a huge ego and needed someone to balance him.
Wells was like just the Supreme Court, fair and just.
A common mission is the foundation for all partnerships. Share a common goal, have a common purpose for what we do, believe in the same mission in life.
If you want to be a mountain, forget about the molehills.
When you are involved in a big thing, have a big heart to go with it.
You cannot assume your partners motivations are the same as yours. There’s a good chance they are not.
While a shared goal is not enough to create a functional pair, without a shared goal, the two people are working at cross purposes. A lack of common mission undercuts collaboration.
