The importance of your ‘posse’ at work

I was reflecting the other day on the most and least successful and happy periods of work throughout my career. One thing kept coming up. When I was most successful, I had a group of people who I engaged with frequently, who I loved hanging with, and where we had each other’s backs. My posse. These were not necessarily people in my team, reporting line or sometimes even company. They were a group of people who had organically coalesced with me for various reasons. Sometimes all the members of my posse had relationships with each other, sometimes just with me. [Maybe posse isn’t quite the right word, but please allow me to use it!] The relationships were not tied to and transcended any one piece of work, projects, role or even company. Some of my posse were challengers – challenging my work and ideas and helping me improve them. Some were intellectual supporters. Some were more emotional support. Some had access to resources, relationships etc. that I didn’t have. Kind of like the Belbin team roles. Some played multiple roles. For some of my posse I played the same role back to them. E.g. we intellectually challenged each other. For some we played different roles, e.g. I provided them challenge, they were able to socialize my work with a wider group of people. For some of us, the relationship was a bit asymmetric, where one of us helped the other more. Sometimes, their role in my life and my role in theirs changed over time. What was common and invariant was that there was unquestioned trust between us.  No question about motivation. The ability to share confidentially. The knowledge that we could call on each other whenever about whatever. No boundaries between professional and personal. (And the implicit agreement that we would not abuse those rights.) All of this reminds me of a comment from the comedian Louis CK. He did something wrong and got cancelled for a couple of years. When he returned he talked about this incident in his comedy. He used to say “When something like that happens to you, you find out who your real friends are…and it is never the ones you want it to be.” Sometimes your posse aren’t the people you imagine they should be, or are going to be. Whilst the best posse dynamics evolve organically – you can’t force it – I think it is really important that we recognize the value our posses, be open to them forming, nurture and make time for them. When you look back on your career and your life , your posses may be the most valuable, enjoyable and beautiful components of both. #unthink #unask #unlearn