Launching Your Career

One of the things that I have become sensitive about over the years, is the idea of building a strong team. I figured out a long time ago that it didn't matter how smart I was if the people working for me weren't smart. While it feels good to be the smartest person on the team, it meant that my career was limited by my own intelligence.

At first, that doesn't sound too bad. Certainly I want my career tied to my own intelligence, don't I? But if I am competing with everyone else based on intelligence then I need to make sure that I am not only the smartest person on MY team, but the smartest person around.

Except I'm not.

I know lot's of people who are smarter at some things than I am.

So competing strictly on intelligence is not a way to the top.

But what if I could harness the power of all of the smart people around me? What if I could take their best ideas and combine them with my best ideas? Wouldn't that make me look smarter?

Of course it would. And this realization is what brought me originally to the idea of building a strong team; A team of people who are actually SMARTER than I am. If I could surround myself with people who were actually smarter than I was, then I could benefit from all of their good ideas and I could launch my career based on their fuel.

But why should they allow me to benefit from their intelligence?

More about that next week.

Dave Meyer
http://www.ecilearning.com