My research is focused on tiny communities of algae and bacteria in lakes and rivers. We don’t understand these tiny organisms very well yet, but we are beginning to understand that they are true communities that have relationships with each other. One species will cling to a more buoyant species in order to reach the surface and use sunlight for photosynthesis. Another species will get its nutrients from neighboring cells that have the ability to capture nitrogen from the air.
Our own human communities are similar. No matter how independent we think we are, we are hopelessly connected to one another. I rely on someone to grow the lettuce that I put on my sandwich and I trust someone will make sure the internet is running so that you can see these words.
When I first started out as a young scientist, I was sold the message to “keep my head down and work hard.” But at some point, it’s the relationships that really matter.
According to Carla A. Harris1, there are two types of workplace currency. The first is performance currency and the second is relationship currency.
PERFORMANCE CURRENCY
Performance currency is all about delivering what is expected of you and a little bit more: showing up early, turning in an above average report, taking on a difficult task. Every time you or your product exceed expectations, you create performance currency.
I worked with a guy who always gave his clients a due date about a month after he expected to complete the project. He told me he wanted to deliver it early to impress the client. Harris says that generating this performance currency will do three things:
Create a good reputation
Get you paid and promoted earlier
Attract sponsor relationships
But performance currency has diminishing returns as time goes on. After a while, everyone expects good work from you. At this point, you have to depend on relationship currency.
RELATIONSHIP CURRENCY
This kind of currency is created when you make investments to the people in your environment (whether that is the workplace or elsewhere). My own workplace environment is more interdependent than ever. Even in my sideline writing career, I depend on the help of critique partners, an agent, and editors to make me dig deeper into that creativity bucket, ultimately writing something better than I could have alone.
Years ago, I took a parenting class. The one piece of advice that has stuck with me was that the relationship is more important than being right. And this doesn’t just apply to parenting. You can be convinced that you are 100% right, but if you insist on your rightness and don’t treat the other with respect and kindness, being right won’t matter.
In a corporation or agency, your success will always depend on other people. So, your success is a function of other people’s judgements—whether you’ll do a good job, whether you’ll be a good leader, whether you will make them look good. In any decision, like who to pick for a coveted assignment or who to offer a contract, there are subjective opinions. And these subjective opinions are influenced by relationships.
SYNERGY – THE 6th HABIT
In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey talks about the habit of synergy, where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. I rely on the concept of synergy when I teach about teams in my project management classes for scientists. Synergy is something scientists know well because it happens all the time in nature, whether it is the microscopic communities I study or giant forests with interconnected roots.
Harris says to look at it this way: everyone has power. But are they willing to use that power to support another person? Especially a person they don’t know? I’ve experienced this on funding panels, where people will use personal relationships to make a judgement about a proposal. In other words, you are not going to get funding, a promotion, or an opportunity if you just put your head down and work hard. You need to establish relationship currency so someone will speak on your behalf.
I like to focus on the benefits of relationships and team diversity. When we build relationships or teams at work, we can balance each other’s strengths and weaknesses. Someone might be a great organizer, another loves going out into the field during bad weather, and a third knows a complicated statistical package and can wrangle the ever-increasing amount of data from our microscopic organisms. By putting all these different skills and people together we get something much greater than an individual could achieve alone—whether that means a picture book combining my poetry with an illustrator’s beautiful pictures or a microscopic community working together to create the air we breath.
Carla A. Harris is a leader with Morgan Stanley. Her ideas about work currency are from an article entitled “Moving up, with Help,” January 2018.
Great points, we all need each other and each of us needs nature right down to the microscopic level.