A match made in…intelligence
Comparing childhood stories with finding perfect colleagues!
Everyone remembers how we used to play with our peers, no matter the background or geographical location, young humans always play together. They stick together, fight, laugh, run and experience life together. Feeling free and completely responsible for their lives at that moment, until their parent picks them up at least, children show a complex system of dealing with social life on the playground. Carefully choosing friend and foe, children go about it in a very efficient way, almost effortlessly casting away those who are not keen to follow or be a part of their game plan and so in a similar way choosing their counterparts, fast to adventure.
Before we go too deep in childhood memories, I wanted for us to take a dip, rather than dive in nostalgia. We will use our memory of the moments when we found friends when being outside, kindergarten, school or generally where we found ourselves with peers. When were these moments, between the ages of 5 and 8, usually at any given chance when faced with kids our age. There was something that made us click with one-another. Often these decisions were made instantaneous and we knew, he’s my friend, she is not and the best part was that this could change in a matter of hours, even minutes. Everything we did was play, even serious at times, we played and we chose who to play with. The invitation was wide and everyone was welcome, if we did not like someones attitude, we simply addressed it or parted ways to pursue our goals and dreams in separate parts of the playground.
What has that to do with our decision making regarding colleagues, partners or employees. If we reach deep inside and find our childish confidence of forming friendships, we will only benefit in our professional and business life. This inert human ability must be cherished and nurtured, even if forgotten. We should take into account chemistry and gut feeling before we delve into the points we need to address, which are professionalism, skills, etc.
As creativity flows best when playing with ideas, teamwork and professional bonding comes out of similar playing. However this time we play with ideas or more accurate, we play on a different level. Be that Web design, Game design, Animation or any other discipline where creativity is encouraged, if we don’t start to play with our colleagues, employees, partners during our creative process, we will never truly know in that instinctive way if they are truly game or not.
Of course this is one point of the issue as many may argue, we are not children anymore. True, so very true, however we are human beings and not everything from our early experience should be discarded. After this initial phase of almost instinctive friendship, we need to concentrate on everything else that is focus these days as skills, personality, attitude, teamplay etc.
This is a thought that I wanted to entertain, hope you liked the read and let me know what you thought in a comment!
/Mike
