Law Seven

Always Make Your Cooperation Greater Than Your Status

Cooperation is essential for lifetime growth. When people come together around a common purpose, they can achieve results that no individual could accomplish alone. Working with others and creating opportunities for increased cooperation makes greater things possible in our lives and in the world. Yet some people mistakenly assume that if they work with others or treat coworkers as equally valuable contributors, people will somehow think less of them, or it will diminish or obscure the value of their own contribution. These people’s attachment to their status keeps them from cooperating with others and puts a ceiling on their growth. Always make your cooperation greater than your status, and you will find unlimited possibilities and synergies in combining your talents and opportunities with those of others.

Some people are born with status—members of royal families, children of celebrities, members of higher classes in social environments where class structures are still observed. For most people, though, status comes as your contributions and achievements grow, and you are recognized for them. While there’s nothing wrong with being recognized, if your primary goal becomes achieving or preserving a level of status, you will cut yourself off from an important source of more wide-ranging achievement and growth: cooperation with others.

Focusing the Contributions of Others

Cooperating and facilitating cooperation do not mean you have to go along with what others say or merely respond to their needs. Cooperation is about focusing on a common objective and allowing everyone to make his or her best contribution. When people put their need for status ahead of the desire for cooperation, their personal agendas become obstacles to progress. The act of preserving status involves never appearing to be wrong, always taking credit, and always preserving the appearance of superiority over others. This takes up a lot of energy. It also gets in the way of achieving breakthrough results.

Trading Status for Results

One arena where you see a lot of people protecting and increasing their status is politics. After all, politics is about power, and status generally gives a person power. Politicians rely on their status in the eyes of the public to get elected, and they use their status in the eyes of other power brokers to get things done. That’s why Ruth Samuelson stood out so much in her approach to the office of county commissioner in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. Ruth got into politics to create results, and she quickly began to see that the way to achieve that was to get to know people, especially the people most likely to oppose her. She started doing this even before announcing that she would run for office. Ruth met with all the influential people who might oppose her candidacy and asked them questions like, “What dangers do you feel are facing the people of Mecklenburg County?” “What opportunities do you see us having available to us as a community?” and “What concerns do you have about my running for office?” This gave her potential opponents an opportunity to feel that they were being heard and also to realize that Ruth was like-minded on many important issues. In the end, they couldn’t find anyone to run against her.

Cooperation Begins with Conversation

Later, when she was in office and tough issues came up, she was able to accomplish results by getting people to cooperate, even if they were from different parties or had different interests, because she was known as someone who would listen and cooperate. She was the one who was willing to say, “All right, what is it that you need out of this, and how can I get what you need and what I need so that we both end up with a better objective than if we fight each other on it?” Ruth understands that cooperation begins with conversation: asking intelligent and open-ended questions; listening; respecting others’ opinions; and understanding people’s real concerns, as well as what opportunities they’re most excited about and what strengths they have to contribute. With this information in hand, she is able to find common ground for communication and agreement that other politicians miss.

Some of the most effective work Ruth has done has been completely out of the limelight. Quietly, she finds creative ways to allow people to put their egos and political affiliations aside so that they can cooperate to create the best results for constituents. This often has to be done behind the scenes. For example, without fanfare, she managed to help orchestrate the move of a $160 million courthouse, an initiative that saved taxpayers tens of millions of dollars, by cooperating with people from the opposing party as well as county government and staff. For primarily aesthetic reasons, the courthouse was to be built in a location that would require the destruction and relocation of several other structures. In the new location, the county will be able to erect a much better building for significantly less money and with many fewer complications.

Why had no one else seen this better solution? They hadn’t asked the questions Ruth asked. When she realized what was going on, she immediately went into action to bring together the parties that needed to cooperate in order to craft the solution. Had it been done publicly, politics would have entered into the picture to a much greater extent, and the cooperation between the various parties and officials would not have been possible. Because people were able to put aside status-related issues and just work together to accomplish what needed to be done, a potential political mess was avoided with relative efficiency.

Ruth’s unique approach has earned her a rare degree of trust from all sides and a reputation for being committed to finding the best solution for the public. Her creativity in fostering cooperation where none seemed possible and the results she has been able to obtain for the people of Mecklenburg County have grown her confidence about what she can make happen. Her latest project is a PBS special on the history of African Americans in Charlotte, North Carolina, for which she raised funding to help reduce local racial tension. Again, the project is based on the idea that mutual understanding leads to increased cooperation. She decided to take her name off of all the funding materials because her political affiliation was drawing resistance from leaders in the opposing party. Making her cooperation greater than her status is a habit that gives Ruth powers of persuasion and a kind of effectiveness that constantly draws opportunities her way.

The Cooperation Bypass

People who get great results through increasing cooperation are often perceived as a threat by those who are concerned with preserving status. If you’re focused on status, consciously or unconsciously, it’s very difficult to even understand how people who work more cooperatively get their results. You risk being bypassed or blindsided by people who come from out of nowhere and grow right past you, stealing your accolades along the way. The annoying thing is, that’s not even the part they care about. They’re just in it for the growth.

Jonathan B. Smith is one of those bypassers. Like Ruth, he gets energy from creating results, and he loves to learn in the process. Jonathan was raising money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society through a program that allowed the fund-raisers to go on a trip if they raised a certain amount. It was suggested that he send letters to solicit donations and then follow up with phone calls. Statistically, only about one in four letters sent in a fund-raising campaign results in a donation. Jonathan owns a company that specializes in Internet marketing for Web sites, and he loves to find ways to use online tools to solve problems. He immediately saw that having a Web site for fund-raising could bring in more donations than a letter-writing campaign because people could just give their money online on the spot rather than having to send in a check, which they often forget to do after getting off the phone.

He decided to test his theory just for fun and try to raise enough money through a Web site that he could go on the trip. So he built the site, and then began calling his friends and asking if they would donate money. But this approach was limited to his direct sphere of influence—the people he knew and could call. Once he decided that he’d raised enough money from his friends and family, he applied his knowledge of search engine marketing to the site so that other people on the Internet who were looking to make donations could find it easily.

Immediately it started working. Donations flowed in from strangers. And so did questions and comments about the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society site, and what people were looking for on it. Jonathan’s site had inadvertently become a hub for people who wanted to donate to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society in the easiest possible way. He had facilitated that process for them and opened a valuable dialogue.

Through their questions he began to see what was most important to donors, and he modified his site to meet their needs. One of the first things to go was the picture of him. People didn’t care about who Jonathan was. What they wanted to know was, “What’s the address for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society? Because I have my checkbook out, and I want to make a donation now.” So Jonathan put this information on the site, but he also made it easier for them to donate directly online. He found answers to their other questions, too, like how to get acknowledged for a donation, how to donate a car or boat, where to donate hair. All of this information found a place on the site, but making donations, the number one concern, stayed front and center.

Through this cooperation with would-be donors, he created a highly effective online fund-raising vehicle. This caused some people at the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s national headquarters to question his motives. Though all the funds went to them, they wanted to know why he was spending his own money and time to raise money for the society, and why he should be allowed to have his own site. They were particularly perturbed that his site was disrupting the traditional system of state-based fund-raising territories, as it drew donations from all across the country with no regard to the donors’ locations.

Jonathan’s site and its success also posed a threat to the status of the society’s paid fund-raisers, whose job it was to raise “major gifts”—donations in excess of $10,000. They couldn’t believe that someone with no infrastructure could get a $50,000 donation in Michigan from a donor in Texas that they had been unable to bring in through traditional channels. The key in this particular case was that the donor had wanted to make the gift on December 29 and have the tax receipt issued for the same year. Doing it online through Jonathan’s site allowed him to be sure that it was taken care of in time.

In all fairness to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, most bureaucratic structures impede cooperation at some level because they entrench hierarchy and the need to preserve status.

Status as a Product of Results

After raising $300,000 for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, Jonathan was named its National Man of the Year in 2004 and given its Chairman’s Citation, which is normally reserved for scientists and researchers who have made notable contributions. The recognition was nice, but it’s not what was important to him. More exciting to Jonathan was how powerful the Internet proved to be as a tool for facilitating cooperation among people who may not have even known the other existed until they did an online search. Diagnosed with diabetes in August 2004, Jonathan made a deal with his doctor to create a similar Web site to raise money for diabetes. This time he worked out the politics up front so that he can focus all his attention on creating results just by doing what he does best—using the Internet to make it easy for people to solve their problems and have their needs met.

It is said that you can accomplish anything in the world as long as you don’t care who gets the credit. If you let status be a by-product of the results you create through increasing cooperation, you’ll keep the path open for your continued growth.

Where Do I Start?

  Be honest about your motives. Why are you really doing what you’re doing? Is it about you and your own advancement, or is it about creating a result that benefits others? Which are you more committed to? What does your behavior say? Sometimes we can surprise ourselves with the answers to these questions. If your ego or your need for status is getting in the way of creating the best result for others, be aware that this leaves you standing still, just waiting to be bypassed by someone who is fully committed just to getting the result. If you really are committed to the result but you still feel defensive about your status, take a look at what this is costing you in terms of time, energy and resources. How big is your “defense budget”? If you were to redirect these resources towards a more cooperative approach could you get results that would speak for themselves?

  Appreciate and invite the talents and contributions of others. We mean this both in the sense of proactive gratitude—appreciating that there are others who can contribute and that their contributions will make for a better result—and in the sense of a plain old, much-appreciated “Thank you” for what they’ve done. No one wants to cooperate with people who are out to take all the credit for their efforts. If you’re creating a solution for a person or group of people, like Jonathan with the donors, or Ruth with the constituents in her county, be sure to recognize that they will have a very important contribution to make. Ask them questions and be open to hearing their answers. The greater the collaboration between the people with the problem and the people who are trying to create the solution, the more effective the solution will be. Effective solutions are what elevate people’s status—at least enough that they are given the opportunity to create more.

  Aim to be in charge rather than to be in control. The most powerful and effective leadership is about being in charge, not in control. What’s the difference? Being in charge involves clearly communicating vision and goals and supporting your team to get the desired result. Being in control presumes that you need to personally drive every part of the process and dictate how things get done. If you believe that you have to be in control of everything, you’ll stifle creativity, confidence and cooperation among team members that naturally happens when you allow talented people to figure out the best way to accomplish a common goal. There are some good books on “servant leadership” that provide guidance on how to be this kind of leader. See lifetimegrowth.com for some suggestions.