LBS 2: Finding Your Fit Between Strengths and Stretches - Devon Davey

Paper Napkin Wisdom

Business success, especially entrepreneurial success, is about finding the right fit for your work, while also finding a harmony with everything else that affects your work. Business success is like relationship success. Sure, it would be wonderful to find the perfect match, but sometimes it’s even better to learn how to make an imperfect match fit. Communication and understanding allow unlike people to form mutually beneficial alliances. When alliances are formed, trust is born. It’s the same with business.

Moving at the speed of trust propels businesses to flourish in a timely manner, while reinforcing and strengthening the foundations of that success.

People often ask Tendrel’s Devon Davey how to build a solid business team. Her go-to reply is: start small with the power of two. Entrepreneurs can move so quickly that they are unable to initially communicate and receive feedback from a large team. Again, to use the relationship analogy, once the trust is established between two people, others can be brought in slowly, and then more rapidly, into the mix.

Listening becomes key in business relationships. Because it’s not about who is right or wrong, but rather it’s about different neutral perspectives having a voice. Neutrality fosters workplace winning, without ego. For instance, partners have strengths you many not possess. Instead of viewing that from a competitive perspective, if their strengths can be accepted as a plus that compliments your weakness, while your strengths also shine, progress can be made without getting personal or emotional. It’s a stretch to leave ego at the door and head into that mutually beneficial magnanimous territory.

Partners, business or personal, come together for each other’s strengths, but stay together because of each other’s stretches. Stretches require solidarity, convergence, and trust. Strengths are where we are comfortable. Stretches require us to take on the unfamiliar, without self-doubt. Together, these two forces are the cornerstones of all success.