Why Relationships Matter: I-to-the-We

Even if you realize the fact that you are in Permanent Beta, even if you develop a competitive advantage, even if you adapt your career plans to changing conditions—even if you do these things but do so alone—you’ll fall short. World-class professionals build networks to help them navigate the world. No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you’re playing a solo game, you’ll always lose out to a team. Athletes need coaches and trainers, child prodigies need parents and teachers, directors need producers and actors, politicians need donors and strategists, scientists need lab partners and mentors. Penn needed Teller. Ben needed Jerry. Steve Jobs needed Steve Wozniak. Indeed, teamwork is eminently on display in the start-up world. Very few start-ups are started by only one person acting alone. Everyone in the entrepreneurial community agrees that assembling a talented team is as important as anything.

Just as entrepreneurs are always recruiting and building a team of stunning people, you want to always be investing in your professional network to grow the start-up that is your career. Quite simply, if you want to accelerate your career, you need the help and support of others. Of course, unlike company founders, you aren’t hiring a fleet of employees who report to you, nor do you report to a board of directors. What you are doing--what you should be doing--is establishing a diverse team of allies and advisors with whom you grow over time.

Relationships matter to your career no matter the organization or level of seniority because every job boils down to interacting with people. In fact, the word company is derived from the Latin cum and pane which means “breaking bread together.” Yes, even if you’re a solo software coder, you’ll still have to work with other people at some point, if you want to create a product people will actually use. Amazon, Boeing, UNICEF, and Whole Foods—to pick a handful of companies--are very different organizations, but they are all, ultimately, people organizations. People develop the technologies, write the mission statements, and stand behind the corporate logos and abstractions.

People are the source of key resources, opportunities, information, and the like. For example, my long-term friendship with Peter Thiel, which started in college, is what connected me with PayPal. Without the relationship, Peter never would have called me with the life changing opportunity. Likewise, without the alliance, I wouldn’t have referred Sean Parker and Mark Zuckerberg to Peter during Facebook’s initial financing. In alliances, resources and assistance flow both ways.

People also act as gatekeepers. Jeffrey Pfeffer, professor of organizational behavior at Stanford, has marshaled evidence that shows that when it comes to getting promoted on your job, strong relationships and being on good terms with your boss can matter more than competence. This is not nefarious nepotism or politics (though sometimes it’s that). There’s a good explanation: a slightly-less-competent person who gets along with others and contributes on a team can be better for the company than somebody who’s 100 percent competent but isn’t a team player.

Finally, relationships matter because the people you spend time with shape who you are and who you become. Behavior and beliefs are contagious: you easily “catch” the emotional state of your friends, imitate their actions, and absorb their values as your own. If your friends are the types of people who get stuff done, chances are you’ll be that way, too. The fastest way to change yourself is to hang out with people who are already the way you want to be.

Despite the fact that nothing important in life is done alone, we still live in a hero-obsessed culture. If you survey the population on how a company of note like General Electric achieved its behemoth status, you’ll probably hear about Jack Welch, but not a peep about the team he built around him. And if you ask about the career of a person like Jack Welch, you’ll hear he got to the top of the totem pole because of things like hard work, intelligence, and creativity.

Typically, all kinds of individual attributes pepper explanations of a person’s success. Books that promise to improve your life are shelved under “self-help.” Seminars that promise to teach you how to be successful are considered personal development. Business schools rarely teach relationship-building skills. It’s all about me, me, me, me. Why do we rarely talk about the friends, allies, and colleagues that make us who we are?

In part it’s because the idea of a self-made man makes for a good story, and stories are how we process a messy, complex world. Good stories have a beginning, middle, and end; drama; clear causation; a hero and a villain. It’s easier to tell stories that neglect the surrounding cast. Superman and His Ten Allies doesn’t quite roll off the tongue as easily as Superman. We’ve been telling and retelling stories like these for centuries. Benjamin Franklin himself “artfully constructed his Autobiography as dazzling lessons in self-making.” Americans are particularly eager to embrace the self-made-man story because we are a country that has long celebrated the ideal of a guns-blazing John Wayne and the rugged individualism he stood for.

But tidy narratives tend to oversimplify reality. In actuality, Franklin’s networks and relationships were a huge part of his life, and played a huge part in his success. Indeed, if you study the life of any notable person, you’ll find that the main character operates within a web of support. As tempting as it is to believe that we are the sole heroes of our own stories, we are enmeshed in cities, companies, fraternities, families, society at large--collections of people who shape us, help us, and yes, sometimes even hurt us. It is impossible to dissociate an individual from the environment of which he is a part. No story of achievement should ever be removed from its broader social context.

The self-made man may be a myth but the old saw “There is no I in team” is wrong, too. There is an I in team. A team is made up of individuals with different strengths and abilities. Michael Jordan needed his team, but no one would dispute that he was more crucial to the success of the Chicago Bulls than his teammates. And one bad apple on an otherwise top-notch team can spoil the whole bunch. Research shows that a team in the business world will tend to perform at the level of the worst individual team member. Your individual talent and hard work may not be sufficient for success, but it’s absolutely necessary.

The nuanced version of the story of success is that both the individual and team matter. “I” vs. “We” is a false choice. It’s both. Your career success depends on both your individual capabilities and your network’s ability to magnify them. Think of it as I to the superscript We. An individual’s power is raised exponentially with the help of a team (a network). But just as zero to the one hundredth power is still zero, there’s no team without the individual.

The book Ben and I wrote this year (from which this post is adapted) is titled The Start-up of You. Really, the “you” in the title is both singular and plural.

(Photo: Flickr.)