There’s No “I” in Team

I’m not a team player. This is not the same as being a bad worker, I’m really good at the work I do. I deliver, and yeah, you don’t have to take my word for it.

What I’m bad at is the other stuff around teamwork. The meetings, the  politics, the artificial niceties. As a morning person, I’m bad at working when other people want me to work (I do my best work between as early as 530am and about noon). I’m bad at:  Looking busy, office casual, management diplomacy, pretending to care, respecting authority, punching the clock, and accepting the status quo. I expect a weird combination of Ayn Rand style ruthlessness and human compassion. I expect everyone to share my eye on the prize. I can be impatient when people don’t get it, I do not suffer fools gladly, and I’m the person who says that thing out loud that no one wants to say. Ironically, I’m super lazy and in order to get back to swinging in the hammock and reading magazines or taking deep winter afternoon naps, I have to get shit done. “Lean in to it, people!” I think. “On the other side, there is an iced coffee and bare feet in the surf. Let’s GO!” — and I expect everyone I work with to feel the same way. I’ve also never approached team sports with any skill or interest, preferring solitary pursuits like swimming, cycling, and cross country skiing. I have major commitment anxiety, I was the one who nearly passed out in fear at our wedding. And all my creative stuff — painting, writing, photography — is stuff I do alone.

Note to self: Way to shoot yourself in the foot in front of potential clients who are reading this. Are you sure you want to hit publish? Plus, whoa, you’d better stay married, because you’re, like, the worst personal ad ever.

Except.

I find that I am in a perfect storm of awesome collaborative projects right now. I have, from day one, been awed by the carbs, caffeine and chocolate fueled wonder that’s Passports with Purpose, our Seattle based travelblogger’s fundraiser. We’re entering our fifth year, still with the same crew of five. We are a collective whirlwind of energy, a mad cocktail of web skills, marketing chops, public relations know how, technical savvy, hard edged critical thinking, deep social media understanding and a common view of the world and our place in it. We used all that to build a school, to house a community, to fund libraries. We’re not the first people to use social media to do social good, not by a long shot, but we built our team, activated a community, and made good things happen. If this sounds terribly self-aggrandizing, I don’t mean it that way, what I mean is that there is no way I could do alone what we do together. [Note added 2014: I resigned from PWP in 2013.]

I’m on a winning streak of contract technical projects,  joining  people who talk straight and are sharply focused when we’re involved in workplace combat. We’re taking the hill. I am genuinely surprised and pleased at the number of times I say, “This is just what I needed to get this done.” — and at the number of times that I hear those same words. My day job stuff can be fuzzy and non-specific. When I told my brother that my current job title is “Content Strategist” he responded, “That sounds like a made up internet job if ever there was one.” But all that fuzziness aside, everyone I’m working with shares a certain willingness to get their hands dirty. Agency work is intense, everyone is overbooked and insanely busy, but the biggest challenge has been getting the time I need from the people I need it from, not getting their attention once I’ve got them shut in a room. With an overworked crew, you’d think I’d see some edginess, some heat. Nope. The wobbliness is never personal, and it’s always backed by a black humor that I appreciate and understand. These people get it done and I’m impressed by that.

And there’s the band, too. I’m not going to write another love letter, embarrassing myself again. I will say that our spring show schedule is filling up and that I don’t seem to mind that it’s cutting into my travel opportunities. The band is another collision of skills that leads to good things happening. We’ve got a website that works and four well mixed tracks and some great band swag and a Fourth of July fireworks array of ideas that seem equal parts outrageous and totally doable. It’s not just the strangeness of hearing clunky bits of sound evolve into something shiny and complete, there’s another aspect to it that’s about creative collaboration. I find myself wanting to write about it, to crack open my ribs and spill out the words that describe what’s happening. And I want to keep it to myself in a “What happens on the bus stays on the bus” way of thinking. But this is true: It’s another thing I could not do alone.

There are people walking around out there who understand teamwork and its value by default; I am not one of them. I am absurdly independent, make of that what you will, and fiercely protective of my ideas. In the kitchen, I’ll take you as a sous chef, you can stand over there and chop onions, but that’s about it. That’s delegation, though, that’s not collaboration. Yet here I am involved in something like the slow drama of baseball — a sport I failed at and won’t play. I’m surrounded by people who do stuff I can’t do, and oh, shit, I need them to do things I want to do. It’s all gelling together and it’s good, it’s all really, really good. How did that happen? And dammit, why am I enjoying it so much?

Photo: Mine, shot at Safeco Field. I always like to imagine that the mound conference is about everything but baseball. They’re saying things like, “Have you read Kavailier and Clay? That Michael Chabon’s a freakin’ genius.”  Or, “My wife wants to go to Thailand on vacation, but I’m worried about the food and what the kids will eat. Mike, didn’t you take your family last winter?”