Lessons from nature to improve how we work
Whenever I’m asked for my top career-building tip, my answer is: Build relationships. Throughout my own career, whenever I’ve started a new job, I’ve started getting to know people both inside and outside of my team.
For example, as soon as I started my last full time job, I booked 1:1s with managers of the platform engineering teams, customer support reps, database experts, designers, product folks, and more. Many of these became regular 1:1s. I had so many people who could help me and my team identify risks in new changes we needed to make in our application, our infrastructure, our process. It also meant our team found opportunities to help other teams, all for the good of the business. Building these bridges across teams led to much better communication and coordination, so important when working on a product with many dependencies.
A new approach
When I started reading Nature’s Blueprint for Business: Harnessing the Hidden Power of Edges by Ines Garcia, it struck me that it’s full of wonderful ideas for identifying and building useful relationships. The book delves into the magic that lies in the edges of ecosystems in nature. It explains how we can find that kind of magic in the boundaries of our organizational departments and groups.
There’s so much information here on how to spot patterns and opportunities we can build on. It’s truly a new way of looking at our organizations – lateral thinking, outside the box. It’s full of stories about nature as well as case studies from organizations from a wide variety of business domains.
I love reading about the lessons from nature. They are beautifully illustrated, which helps me understand the concepts. It’s such a new way of looking at how we work, it is taking me some time to digest and fully understand the concepts. What I’m learning will help me be more deliberate in building relationships not only for myself, but for teams I’m helping.
Highly recommended!
Though this book is only about 100 pages, you won’t want to rush through it. Get your copy, and delight in a fresh look at what nature can teach us about making our teams successful.
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