Independence - or Interdependence?

Stephen Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Successful People, convinced me many years ago that independence is a sorry state of mind. He demonstrated that independence is the state of attempting to self-manage a very part of one’s life, when all around you, a vast interdependent organism we call the world flourishes and grows doing what it does best; inter-relate, inter-mediate, inter-change, inter-mix and inter-depend.

Like it or not, believe it or not, we are an inter-dependent entity. However.. many of us, especially small business owners like me, like to think that we run our business to be independent. And on we struggle and strive, attempting to manage and control everything to remain independent, until (hopefully, eventually) we arrive, kicking and screaming, at the place where we began; with the reality that we are in fact dependent on the same staff we have harried and interfered with to make ‘em ‘do it my way’.

Of course when we arrive at that point we’ve already accumulated some serious baggage.

• We are now ‘The Boss’ rather than a team member.
• We have most likely incurred serious karma with some staff members who have been shown we care not a whit for their input.
• Our clients have picked up on our unwillingness to ‘risk’ control though our unwillingness to work with them rather than work to get stuff from them.
• Similarly, our suppliers aren’t willing to go the extra 30 days because you’ve already nailed their options to your wailing wall.

I have a theory I don’t often talk about. I believe that a small business has nothing or little to do with ‘business’. It’s to do with exposing who we think we are to who we really are. It’s about progressing our individual consciousness through the whiteknuckle exposure to the world of commerce, money and relationship. Money. Lack. Need. Perception of need. Ego.

And every day, I try my best to walk the line of ethical business, care of my employees and my clients and my suppliers, quality control and internal systems. And I KNOW after 40 years of doing the same and seeing the same mistakes, that every day is going to challenge a belief I hold onto about my own capability to make a difference.

So all that is good enough. But when I concede that I need the assistance of others to make my life dream fulfilled, then the flip side of the coin is the realisation that I am doing this because I don’t have the abilities to do everything as well as others may. But here’s where it gets foggy, because what you can’t know is what you can’t do. How do you KNOW what you are best and worst at in the first place if you come from a fixed position, like a sailor looking out of one porthole and claiming to have seen the world. What if the way you operate is actually instinctive? What if you have always operated the same way? Doesn’t it follow that you always will? And if that is so, why would you even try to do things you aren’t suited to do when you have fellow team members who would jump at the chance to do it BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT THEY DO BEST?

The missing link, as we can see from the aforegoing, is KNOWING what I do best and what my team members do best. So let’s fantasize for a moment. What about a work environment where we all knew what our fellow teamsters could do best?

Just think about it. You would meet and swap tasks. Because everyone knows you aren’t good at say, analyzing the elements of a new project, even though you were great at visualizing it, they wouldn’t even ask you to analyse it. “Charlie over here is a whizz at it. Let’s give it to him”. Think of any strategy you use in getting things done, and you are looking at your instinctive drives foisted on relatively unwilling and unqualified team members. It’s like taking potshots in the dark.

So your instinctive drives are what you are, how you do things. They are not going to get you sacked because they aren’t good or bad. They just are.

Unfortunately, forced interdependence can be a pain in the balance sheet. A small business environment has to share the load when one person goes on holidays. A small business has to ask people to do things beyond their normal roles in times of pressure. And a small business loses a large chunk of itself when someone leaves or is retrenched. So small business is the most vulnerable to forced interdependence, but the most profitable if planned, conscious interdependence is standard practice.

Think now how interdependence would look if we all know what we could do best. It’s be interdependence on steroids!

I reluctantly ordered my I.D.™ (Instinctive Drives®) test developed by Paul Burgess at Link-up International Pty Ltd. Lord knows I’ve done so many questionnaires in my sixty years I was ‘over it’. But my friend Lindy pestered me. ‘We’d have so much to talk about!” she said.. and kept saying. So.. I did it. It took about 15 minutes on the net. And my results came back in a few minutes more.

To say I was amazed is not enough. This test nailed me! I saw why I did what I did when I did it. I saw how I disguised my real power from myself. I saw I didn’t need to downplay what I excelled at. I saw that I had set strategies in place related to who I thought I should be rather than who and what I was. And I was given realistic ‘Now’ replacement strategies to implement immediately. But what really amazed me was the revelation that yes, just as the report said, we don’t change our Instinctive Drives – ever.

We are what we are and on the Fourth day He/She declared it is Good.

When Cassie saw the results she laughed.. and cried.. and asked to do her own. Then we both laughed, cried, and planned together. We found we were both excellent at evaluating new projects and finding the flaws. We realized what a great team we were, forging growth slowly, surely and safely. But we saw we had the need for others around us who could fill in the many gaps we also saw where we were not suited to the task.

Luckily, we have a wonderful team in our Alkaway business; people committed to working with us to advance our group future. So we are about to give the I.D. questionnaire to everyone we work with; and then we’ll stand back, let it sink in, and begin rebuilding how we carry out the daily assignments that make up the guts, the essence, the FLOW of our small business. As Paul says, we’ll post a sign on the front door: “I.D. spoken here”.

One of my own 'Drives' is to micro-manage things with a view to constant improvement. I never stop evaluating our internal and external processes we already have in place to see whether we can improve them. But a problem with this can be that it is somewhat inward-focused. Perhaps that is why I never perceived that spending company cash on a simple test could create radical, beneficial change in how the organism (our business) we call Alkaway could perform. That is because I couldn’t see another way to do things.. and I venture to suggest that that is the problem faced by every small business owner everywhere. We do what we do because that’s what we do. So I suggest opening up your mind to a new way of doing business. I predict that this decade will be the decade of the smart and the gone. Smart businesses open to new ways will go forth and prosper. The others will be gone.

P.S. My friends at Link-up International have extended a special offer for our readers to have their I.D. done during the month of March 2010. Go here to check out the great deal.

Their offer will save you big $$ on the usual price.
This is the link:

http://shopping.netsuite.com/s.nl/c.48835/it.A/id.40/.f

...and be sure to enter your discount code, the word 'healthemail' to claim your discount.

By the way, I should add, I'm making nothing from this. it's just something the ID guys offered to me when they saw the article you just read.