Thirty years ago, my mentor Rick Setzer, one of the most brilliant businessmen and leaders I have ever met tried to teach me the concept of Interdependence. I could get it conceptually, but never could understand it emotionally. I could get it in my head, but not my heart. The purpose of this blog is to help you cut short a journey that took me thirty years to really understand.
What Rick told me was that as children we are all dependent upon others for our needs and wants, hopefully as we get older we become independent and self sufficient. However, if we want to truly build a large business or enterprise of any kind, that is sustainable, we must learn how to move from independent to interdependent. For my fiercely independent mind this was a very simple idea in theory, but nearly impossible in practice. I have long been a strongly committed control freak that found it difficult to let go, to trust that someone else could do something as well, as quickly, or as cost effectively as I could myself. So, to be honest, I was a control freak and cheap.
My pattern was I would know I needed help, hire someone, but when they didn't do it as well or as fast I would, I would then take the tasks back. One of the major turning points for me to start understanding was reading the books, "Cashflow Quadrant," by Robert Kiyosaki, it explains the emotional reason why people behave as they do in business, and why, they "get it with their heads" but their hearts won't let them do what they need to do. Also the book "E-Myths Revisited" by Michael Gerber, explains what structure that the typical entrepreneur refuses to put into place (because of those emotions) that causes them to fail. Please do yourself a favor and read them both, they are two sides of the same coin, structure and the emotions that block you from doing the structure.
Two of the greatest lessons I had both were happening at the same time. One was accepting a job as VP of Sales for a new home builder that had nineteen locations, with nineteen sales people across nine counties. Clearly I couldn't be in all of them at the same time and had to learn to empower others and lead by serving them rather than trying to boss them. The second was accepting the position of Tournament Director for my two son's school wrestling club. This was a new position for the club as we added tournaments as fundraisers to get away from candy and pizza sales. This entailed staging and running 4-5 major tournaments a year, that each needed about three months prep time. It required about one hundred volunteers in place from early Friday afternoons on Tournament weekends, through all day Saturday, and maybe Sunday. If you want to learn leadership skills, run a volunteer organization where you cannot boss anyone about anything or they walk out the door. Both of these helped me start to understand interdependence.
Working in a real estate model the last ten years that operates in a servant role rather than one that's top-down, where instead of hiring agents to work for the firm, we are hired by the agents to support their businesses at scale to free them up to more effective and efficient with their time. Each are independent contractors who we work together to make both theirs and our businesses work. The greatest challenge I see is that most of them, like myself, struggle to let go and go interdependent. This is not just a REALTOR thing, I see it in almost every small business owner, commission sales person or franchise owner. All would benefit greatly from reading those books.
When you look at the inner workings of a real estate office, it is its on ecosystem. Ours does thousands of transactions per year, and you see many other companies who orbit this ecosystem, companies like title insurance, P&C insurance, mortgage, home warranties, inspection, photographers, marketing and any number of other industries that sustain themselves on those transactions. It actually operates almost like a small city where businesses coexist, compete, and actually support each other.
Recently, I have also branched out into working in the Senior Services industry. What I find there is exactly the same things, the same dynamics playing out. The same difficulties letting go of tasks, the same difficulties of finding that interdependence space where we can all understand that the fear of, or belief in a scarcity mindset, is actually our biggest enemy. What has become very clear, to me, is that the more we can break down the silos of information, of resources that can be available across the platform of individual companies and industries the better we can serve our clients.
If you haven't read "Delivering Happiness" by Tony Hsieh, or their follow up book from Zappos, "The Power of Wow" by the Zappo employees, I strongly recommend them. The second one explains their adventure into Holacracy management style breaking down the traditional hierarchical systems we are all familiar with. They are honest about the bumps in the road they have fought through. But as you read it, you will start to realize all they are really doing is going from Dependent to Independent to Interdependent.
What could we all do together, if we truly understood and embraced how together we can solve our client's issues better than any one of us can alone? If we understood that there is no such thing as scarcity but abundance? This topic will be continued. Please if you have questions let's talk.
Jim Morgan 317-610-7458 or jim@abilityplus.com
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