How to Bring Cooperation back to the Workplace

Success and fulfillment arrive from finding the “flow” of your work, having a best friend in the office, and in developing strong partnerships with your colleagues and customers. Allow yourself to feel secure enough in your own power as an individual to share it with others who contribute in a meaningful fashion. As a result, you’ll significantly enhance your power through the respect others gain for you after witnessing such inner confidence. If you feel somewhat overwhelmed by these issues, you’re not alone. Power over others is a daunting proposition. Sure, there’s a primal sense of power that feels good when we can tell others what to do and they are forced, more or less, to obey our commands. It’s as if we are stronger, better, more privileged, and more worthy of reward. It’s not easy to give up that primal feeling. But there’s a feeling that’s more fulfilling in the long run: cooperating with others freely. It’s the alte ative to be more productive and successful in the business world because we’re part of a team that functions more efficiently and effectively, while making us feel more involved and appreciated on the basis of who we are in terms of our skills and deeper values. We get the job done with less effort and less stress, and in the process, we help others become even more proficient of producing their own results. As Warren Bennis, guru on business leadership and professor of business administration at the University of Southern Califo ia, puts it in a Time magazine article, “There’s a point at which you find an interesting kind of nerve circuitry between optimism and hubris. It becomes an arrogance of conceit, and inability to live without power.” Competition and conflict are much more prevailing within organizations rather than cooperation. “It has become clear that nature is filled with competition and conflicts of interest,” writes jou alist D. Brooks in The Atlanta journal-Constitution. “Status contests came before humanity, and are embedded deep in human relations. We strive for dominance and undermine radical egalitarian dreams. We’re tribal and divide the world into in-groups and out-groups.” It’s much easier to be simplistic, self-serving, and single-minded in the world of business-easier but not more profitable, at least not in the long run. What really works-in terms of effective leadership, employee loyalty, a more successful marketing approach, superior customer service-is the framework of strategic relationships.