I'm Not Nancy-Bashing

When my wife read my post about goals, she said that it made her sound like "a meany." I assured her that my intention was not to make her out to be the bad guy, as reality checks are part of "her job." In all honesty, that is one of the things that I rely on her for – we often tell people that I have my head in the clouds, and she has her feet on the ground, and that's what makes us so successful.

I think that every company needs that kind of balance to be healthy. There are all sorts of personalities in the world, and only when the best is drawn from each of those personalities and combined do we see true excellence. If you look, there is a lot of literature on this.

My wife calls it "Button Soup", referring to the children's book in which a town full of people who have nothing combine their meager ingredients to create a very tasty broth that they all enjoy.

In The E-Myth Revisited, Michael Gerber says that it takes three roles to effectively run a company: the entrepreneur, who comes up with ideas and keeps the company moving forward; the manager, who keeps the trains running on time; and the technician, who actually does the production work. A successful business owner recognizes which of these roles she excels at, and finds help with the others. If not, she'll often burn out.

A dear friend of ours, Jan Day-Gravel, conducts testing and workshops introducing a concept called Emergenetics. Emergenetics begins with a test that categorizes the way we think into four specific areas: conceptual, structural, analytical, and social. An individual's scoring in these categories represent the amount of energy that he must to expend to think in that area. (For example, I scored 53% in conceptual thinking, meaning that it comes very naturally to me, versus 3% in structural thinking, which exhausts me.) Most people are dominant in two modes of thought.

Part of the workshop training discusses identifying ways to draw on others' strengths to supplement our own. If a team is too heavy on, say, conceptual/social thought, they're not likely to collect on the invoices (or even send them out for that matter). In contrast, a team that's heavier on the structural/analytical side will have trouble connecting with their customers, and may even end up alienating them.

All of this considered, Nancy and I make a great team. She helps me consider the real-world, playing devil's advocate to my crazy ideas; and forces us to slow down and follow through methodically. Without her, nothing would get done.

My role is to help her conquer her risk aversion, challenging her to step out of her comfort zone and face the unknown. I often play a supporting role to her, helping her flesh out her ideas and plan out implementation strategies.

In short, we complete each other.

Our team at Belmont, Inc. extends our capabilities even further. Each individual puts their own talents and strengths into the "soup", and the resulting collaborative efforts are extraordinary.

My advice to anyone who's asking would be to find the yin to your yang, whether it be in your personal or professional life. The result is infinitely greater than anything we can do on our own.