Don't Go It Alone

Our culture is beguiled by individual achievers -- the CEO, the movie star, the MVP. But the fact is, none of us work alone, and we all do better when we work with others. Even Michael Jordan had Scottie Pippen.

That's a good thing, for people and for organizations. Collaboration increases efficiency, elevates performance, and improves results. So say Gallup's Rodd Wagner and Gale Muller, coauthors of Power of 2: How to Make the Most of Your Partnerships at Work and in Life, which was named one of the best business books of 2009 by CEO Read.

There's something about being forced to be alone that's torturous, that is psychologically disadvantageous.

As they note in the book, "In the workplace, employees with just one collaborative relationship are 29% more likely to say they will stay with their company for the next year and 42% more likely to intend to remain with their current employer for their entire career, compared to those with no partnerships." Those who are well-partnered are also much more engaged: "They generate higher customer scores and better safety, retention, creativity, productivity, and profitability for the business -- and a greater level of happiness for themselves."

Such partnerships are all too rare. In fact, Wagner and Muller found that 16% of employed Americans report that they don't have a partnership at work, and nearly one-quarter say they've never had a great partnership at work. When those who do have workplace collaborators are asked how many strong alliances they have, the authors note, "Most people say they have just a few, even though the highest levels of happiness and employee engagement kick in when a person has 5 to 10 good alliances."

We can increase our chances of creating those alliances if we know what a good partnership requires. After combing through and analyzing data for five years, Wagner and Muller discovered that the best partnerships have eight specific characteristics: complementary strengths, a common mission, fairness, trust, acceptance, forgiveness, communication, and unselfishness. (See sidebar "The Eight Elements of a Powerful Partnership.") In this interview, the first of two parts, Wagner and Muller discuss complementary strengths, fairness, common goals -- and how they made their own partnership work so well.

GMJ: What inspired you to write this book?

Rodd Wagner: A number of years ago, Gale gave a presentation at Gallup's Minneapolis office about complementary partnerships. It was advice for us as an organization, something he felt passionate about.

As I listened to his presentation, it struck me that he had opened up a new line of investigation into human nature and into a major business problem that simply had not been addressed. I couldn't think of a single book that addressed the issue of how to form a solid partnership or how to really strengthen collaboration. I could think of tons of marriage books -- you can fill a room full of books about how to have a great marriage -- but I couldn't think of a single one that was about how to form a good working relationship with someone else, even though those kinds of relationships are all around us. And I was struck by the science behind whether a partnership succeeded or failed.

So I offered to drive Gale to the airport when he left, and on the way, I said, "Gale, what you talked about today is a fantastic topic, and I think you ought to write a book about it." And he said, "Oh no, I don't know that we could ever do that." And then about a year later, he said, "I'm thinking about writing that book. Do you want to write it with me?"

GMJ: What did you say?

Wagner: I told him, "I've been wondering when you were going to ask!"

GMJ: But ironically, writing is usually a solitary task. Aren't there situations in which people get more done alone than with others?

Wagner: Certainly, there are some tasks where people can work well alone. However, think what correctional systems do to punish people: They put them in solitary confinement. There's something about being forced to be alone that's torturous, that is psychologically disadvantageous. And yet many times we stay in our own offices, in our own cubicles, for the entire day. Yes, we're e-mailing and we're talking on the phone, but we're by ourselves. In many cases in American business, we have an imposed solitary confinement, and all the research says that's not healthy. Leading a solitary life is as dangerous to one's health as smoking or a sedentary lifestyle or having high cholesterol.

Gale Muller, Ph.D.: There are certainly some people who are what we call individual performers. There's a certain percentage of people, we found in the research, who don't see themselves as actually gleaning anything from a partnership -- and they're probably right. There are some people who seem to have been burned by past experiences as well. We quote one of them in the book, who said, "I've learned -- sadly -- that I'm better at taking care of my responsibilities myself and not depending on others for creative success in my personal, artistic, or professional futures." But the majority of the people we studied indicated that they are more productive in a partnership than not.

The greater the quality of partnerships, the more engaged the individual is likely to be.

Wagner: We do know that the greater the number and quality of partnerships, the more engaged the individual is likely to be. We know that engagement is connected to a whole host of positive organizational outcomes. We know that human nature is such that the vast majority of people, arguably all people, are incomplete pieces of the puzzle. They don't have everything they need to be the complete solution for a major business challenge. It requires the talents of a number of different people. And that makes a pretty strong business case for more partnerships.

There's a lot of pressure in organizational cultures for each person to be all things to all people. Be good with math, be a good writer, be a good speaker, be a good project manager, be a good strategist -- and human nature just isn't that way. Most people have some of those abilities but not all of them, and their colleagues, many times, have the piece of the puzzle they lack.

GMJ: What you're talking about is having complementary strengths, which you note is the first characteristic of a good partnership. But, assuming you even know what yours really are, how do you ascertain the strengths of someone else?

Dr. Muller: Strengths can be defined and measured; we do that all the time with the Clifton StrengthsFinder assessment. And then there's consulting and coaching and so on to help people find those complements. But at a very simplistic level, one must admit to what one doesn't do very well, to say, "What do I need? And is there someone who could provide that piece that I don't have, who would want to provide that for our work?"

Take Rodd and me, for example. We're pretty good complementary partners because I recognized early on that I was an inadequate writer, and Rodd is a brilliant writer. Now, I had to be smart enough to realize that, and Rodd had to be good enough to say he would be a part of this idea and carry that load.

Wagner: And Gale's a far superior researcher to me. One of the things a person needs to realize is that we have a cultural bias for being well-rounded people -- the universal man, the polymath. Most people think that they are more well-rounded than they actually are.

The first step to understanding complementary strengths and understanding one's need for a partnership is disabusing yourself of this idea that you can be all things to all people and recognizing that your strengths may be much stronger than you realize and your weaknesses much weaker. Therefore you need help, but you are also precisely the help that someone else needs. It's exceptionally liberating when you can concentrate on what you do best knowing that your partner is doing what he or she does best, relieving you of the burden of something that you don't do well.

Dr. Muller: And one of the very subtle but very important pieces of this is that it must be real; it can't be fake. You can't say, "I like Joe and he can help me out on this, even though I'm better at it than him." That doesn't work. You must really, at a core level, need that person. If you don't, the partnership won't ever approach being mutual.

We noticed in the research that the collaboration doesn't have to be a 50/50 split, but when one of the individuals is doing less than 20% of the work, it's not so much a partnership as it is one person's quest with someone else's assistance. For it to be a partnership, it really needs to be 25/75, 66/33, 50/50, somewhere along that line.

GMJ: I'd have never guessed. I would assume that the workload would have to be split evenly to seem fair.

Dr. Muller: Fairness is vital. Without it, everything falls apart. But I think one must take that idea of fairness apart very carefully, because nothing's ever really 50/50, and nothing is ever totally fair at that moment. In most partnerships, one person or the other carries the partnership at one time or another. Usually, it goes back and forth. But what one person gets out of the partnership is not the same as what the other gets out of it. What they get out of it must meet their needs.

Very often, people have different motivations for wanting to accomplish the same goal.

The idea of fairness is intricate and unique, and it's not an easy thing to figure out. In the best partnerships, both partners are concerned about making sure the other person gets fairly rewarded for their work. But it doesn't have to be an even split. At any one moment in time, it may be -- or may seem to be -- very one-sided.

GMJ: Can you give me an example?

Dr. Muller: Take the partnership between the founders of Hewlett-Packard, an example we used in the book. Bill Hewlett got called up for Army service for several years, and Dave Packard had to carry the business himself, yet he reduced his company salary to equal Bill Hewlett's military pay.

Wagner: That Hewlett-Packard story is reminiscent of an old-school sense of fairness that I think we've lost along the way: the idea of fair dealing and not wanting to be perceived as elbowing someone out or taking unfair advantage of a situation. There are things that partners can do to take care of that, and Packard is probably the best example.

But remember, it's not always about money. Sometimes it's just recognizing that your collaborator may have a different reason for being on this journey with you and recognizing what you can do to help him or her get to that particular spot. Think about being your partner's advocate to help her or him accomplish the goal. You may not value that goal as much, but you need to appreciate that's the reason why your partner is on this journey with you. You need to understand what your counterpart is looking for and help him or her get there.

GMJ: But you need to have a common goal, right? How do you determine if you have one?

Dr. Muller: I think that we often make a lot of assumptions about goals, but we don't clarify them. So when you start down the path, you both assume that you're on the same journey, and you never discuss it. Then a month or two or a year later, you find you're really heading in two different directions. Partners need to talk about goals and not make assumptions.

Say that two people are building a business together. One of them wants to get a lot of equity built up in the business in order to sell it and make a lot of money. The other wants to build a business that can forever sustain their families and to make a contribution to society. Even though they're both working hard at building a business, pretty soon they'll face a decision that will ruin the chances for one of them to reach his goal. That's why you shouldn't make assumptions.

Wagner: One of the reasons that this book turned out as well as it did is because early on, we discovered we had a very strongly aligned view of the book, but we had slightly different reasons for why we wanted to see that book come out.

Dr. Muller: I was more interested in writing something that would be of benefit in managing people at Gallup, while Rodd was more interested in writing a book that could be used by our clients. So our reasons were not too different.

Wagner: Very often, people have different motivations for wanting to accomplish the same goal. Acknowledging our individual motivations, though, let us be singularly focused on the same goal. Before we had asked questions of a single respondent, before we had written a single paragraph, we talked about what we were embarking on and where we were trying to go, and we made sure that we weren't trying to paddle the canoe in two different directions.

-- Interviewed by Jennifer Robison