May Busch* remembers some fatherly advice about how doing slightly more of the work and taking slightly less of the credit has huge benefits in the long term.
Something marvellous happens for your career when you become the person who’s top-of-mind when a project calls for collaboration — and don’t they all these days?
In my experience, there’s a specific quality that makes you a great collaboration partner.
You might think that special quality is being smart, strategic, technically skilled, or having the best network of connections.
While all of these are helpful, there’s another quality that stands out above the rest.
It’s something I learned from my father, who also happens to be a celebrated scientist and one of the founders of the field of biomedical engineering.
One of my father’s philosophies is the 60/40 principle.
Instead of insisting that collaboration be a strictly 50/50 endeavour, my father is always willing to give a little more and expect a little less in return.
His reasoning is even if you ‘lose’ a little now, you win big in the long run.
That’s why he’s willing to take on 60 per cent of the work and allow others to take 60 per cent of the credit if that’s what it takes to get the project done.
While most of us want things to be fair and equal in every situation, he looks at it from a broader perspective and longer-term horizon.
Since it’s often difficult to decide exactly what 50 per cent of the work or 50 per cent of the credit is, he’s willing to give, rather than take, that 10 per cent when there are grey zones.
As a result, he has become known as a great person to collaborate with.
In fact, others seek him out and propose opportunities that he otherwise might not have had access to.
This means he has accomplished far more in his career than if he had focused on 50/50 each time and argued about that 10 per cent swing factor.
As my father reminded me, there’s a big difference between 60/40 and giving away all the credit.
Remember, it’s not the 70/30 or 80/20 principle. You still want to get credit for your work, but without getting picky about things on the margin.
I’m reminded of those team projects at school where the group gets an ‘A’ but the brainy student does all the work. None of us want to be taken advantage of like that.
If you are, then you definitely want to stop that from happening in the future — just don’t make the mistake of leaving your manager out of the loop.
When it comes to getting the appropriate amount of credit without getting too nit-picky, the key is to make sure your manager knows the reality. It’s up to you to do that.
For example, in one of my favourite roles, I was charged with getting people in different business unit silos to collaborate to produce better results for our clients.
Each unit had their own client relationship team and they often bumped into each other in the reception area of the client because they weren’t coordinating with each other.
One measure of my team’s success was the revenue the firm was able to generate by collaborating.
However, if we took credit for the increased revenue, the client teams would stop wanting to work with us and our effort would fail.
The credit needed to go to them, not to us. This meant not taking credit for the wins the sales teams brought in.
With my manager, I explained what we were doing and why the moment we took credit for the revenue increases, we would fail in our effort.
So while we wouldn’t take credit publicly, we counted on his knowing our impact and advocating for us.
When you adopt my father’s 60/40 principle, instead of arguing about how to split the pie, you end up expanding the set of opportunities open to you.
So, how good a collaboration partner are you?
How could the 60/40 principle help you become a more sought-after partner for collaboration at work?
*May Busch works with smart entrepreneurs and top managements to build their businesses. She can be contacted at [email protected].
This article first appeared at maybusch.com.
