Cape Crusaders Collaborate!

You know who totally gets collaboration?
Batman. He didn’t do the world-saving-things himself; he understood the
power of a Robin and an Alfred and he collaborated well with the police.
He got collaboration. And I think it made him more powerful. As I get
ready for a talk on power thru collaboration on Saturday, I’ve been
studying the issue. Really. I studied Wonder Woman some more. Then I
watched Batman Again.

Here’s 7 things I think Batman can teach each
of us:

Believe in something. Superman wanted to save
planet earth, Spiderman wanted to rid injustice, and Batman wanted to
save the world from its own fear. Just like them, when we mere humans
have an amazing mission in something, we can pursue that thing until the
cows come home because we can’t imagine not working on it. We
care because we see it as broken or wrong. We care because we can
imagine a world better for it. It’s embodied in the people who attend
TED. For example, I I have a mission to change how companies and people
work. I want to help companies to win markets by moving from a command
and control approach that suppresses the human spirit to creating
workplaces where the human being can be fully alive/creative/engaged. I
can’t prove it (yet) but I know it creates better business outcomes. I
believe in that something, and will keep pursuing regardless of how
rough the road ahead lies. And I will get better at sharing my mission
to help get many people engaged in the endeavor. You see, believing in
something clearly and articulating it lets other people get behind the
mission. It’s what Derek Sivers described in the video where the “2nd
dancer made the first lunatic a leader”. (http://bit.ly/dd9gsA).

Get the right tools.  For superheroes, it might be
cuffs that can repel bullets, or the mighty lasso that revealed all
truth. And for us mortals at work, it is our knowledge, our education,
our experiences that help us build up our toolset. We cannot have power
without having the ability to think, to take in new ideas, to develop
new insights, to create new outcomes. Notice that I did not point out
rank or title as the key to the right tools. While those can be helpful,
they are not necessary to creating great power. And in some ways, they
get in the way of generating value. That’s what great tools should do —
help us to create more value and pursue our mission.

Get
good sidekicks. Batman had Robin and Alfred, and in doing so, he got
people who worked with him to create change. Robin did major work, and
Alfred got the cool tools ordered. Having the right people on our teams
always matters because it is when many people work together they can
create more momentum towards a goal. Plus, of course, it can be fun to
work with other smart and creative people. We live in an era of creative
work. Unlike the era of production where we produced cars and we valued
physical power or the era of information where we valued mental powers
and produced computing chips. We live in the era of creative work where
we what we produce is often a product of co-creation and uses emotional
power in that effort.

Don the cape. The difference
between the Superheroes and the wanna-be-superheroes lies in this one
key thing. At some point, we gotta put on the cape. We gotta decide that
we will take on the tough task that no one wants to take on, to go
where no one else wants to go, to seek out new opportunities. You gotta
don the cape. You’ve gotta decide you want power, that you will use it
well, and that you will engage the tough issues. Don the cape says that
you choose to lead or to win. You cannot be a superhero without this
step. I call this in The New How “stepping up”. Without each of
us stepping up, collaboration never happens. Without each of us choosing
to change how things work, it’ll always be the same. We gotta don the
cape and decide that we will engage.

When Superheroes do these 4
things — they have power. Now the question is what do they do with it?
You might guess by my thesis that “How” is going to matter a lot in this
story. Most Superheroes face tough foes. In the case of Batman, he
faced some seriously psycho characters, wanting to tear apart the city
of Gotham. While most of us won’t face psychopaths, but we will face
people who don’t agree with us.

Handle Adversity: We
will face people who have their own beliefs, tools and approaches and
they want something different than you. Does that make them wrong, and
you right? Or does it create an opportunity to co-create an outcome that
you might not yet imagine. I believe the latter.  I personally didn’t
handle my biggest moment of adversity well. Let me share that story as
an example of how power can be used poorly. When I was working at a big
company, I had this role where I was responsible for a relatively big
part of a business. I had a lot of people reporting to me, and I owned a
revenue # for a $40M business line plus I had some indirect
responsibility for an even bigger $300M revenue line. Someone who didn’t
report to me has an opinion for how to do marketing for this business
line and I disagreed with her. At first, I tried to talk with her, and
she viewed that as meddling in her business. Then I challenged her in
meetings which caused her to think I was trying to push her around. And
all the while we were no longer engaging the real issue of the business;
it had become personal. Now what makes this story sad is that this was
one of my best friends. I had run marathons with her. I had gotten up at
5:00am to do 20 mile long runs with her. We shopped and laughed and
dated together. She had cheered me on as I finished the Cal
International Marathon. I loved her. But I wasn’t willing to give up my
position in being right. Being right mattered more to me at that point,
than being loyal to our friendship. So after a while, our disagreement
grew in scale as the budgets needed to be signed off by higher-ups and
so more people knew of our disagreement. It went all the way to the
executive staff of the Americas division to discuss the differences and
ultimately have someone rule what the decision would be. I was
completely willing to take down my “opponent” to win the argument. I
treated this colleague like an archenemy. Good choice? Not so much. I
failed the test of how to handle adversity because I believed it was
about winning on the topic. What I didn’t realize then, and I hope I am
sharing the right lesson with you is that I might have got the “what”
right in terms of the marketing strategy but I got the “how” wrong in
building trust amongst a colleague. She never wanted to work with me
again, and I had lost the trust of others in my workplace because they
knew (and rightly so) that I would walk on them to get my way more than I
would work with them to get a new way. I got fired, we never spoke
again. I might have won the battle but I didn’t live to win the war. And
if we handle adversity as if the other person is the archenemy, we miss
the opportunity to go past the 1 win to score many wins. Which brings
me to another lesson that SuperHeroes can lend us.

Know your
Weaknesses. We all have achilles heels. It could be physical,
mental or emotional. Superman’s weakness was Kryptonite. It was
physical. And he really couldn’t’ escape this weakness of his. Mine can
be binaryism— to see an answer and think it is the only answer.
That is clearly a mental weakness. We all have weaknesses, and that is
okay. A friend of mine’s sister was brutally attacked as a girl and so
my friend has PTSD and therefore little things can get in the way of her
functioning. If we manages her stress level well, she doesn’t get
triggered and no one knows how she carries this issue. That’s an example
of emotional weakness.  Whatever that is for you, it’s okay to have it.
You just need to know you have it. And to know it is to also accept it.
Because I know mine and have to befriend it, I can see when I’m doing
it and therefore manage around it.

Which brings me to my final
lesson from Superheroes:

Take off the Mask. Superheroes are
on call for doing a lot, and it can be awfully in demand. After all,
lots of things need fixing and we need superheroes to help. They need to
work hard. But there are times when they need to also restore.
Superheroes have masks so that sometimes they can take it off. And so we
humans can also learn that lesson. We can realize that we need some
downtime. A time when we are vulnerable. We need to retreat to our
batcave where our loved ones know us by our real, and likely messy
identity. Where they love us not for what we do, but for who we are. I
suspect it would be very easy for the superhero to believe they were the
character they played rather than the human that they are. We play
characters in life also. Mom, CEO, Director, Leader --- but those are
characters in our life — roles we play. But they are not us. And so we
have to have safe bat caves where we can come to rest and take off our
masks and just be. It’s how we’ll have the energy to do our mission
another day.  

Power comes from our belief in a mission, getting
the tools, people for the cause, then doning the cape. Wisdom in power
comes from how we handle adversity in our role, accept our weaknesses,
and knowing when to take off the mask. These are simple concepts yet
complex in application. Both ordinary and ancient in principle.

When we apply the lessons of Batman to our work, i think we'd learn to be more clear about our mission, how to handle adversarial relationships and how use the power of collaboration to get more shit done.