This was a hard blog to write because it begins with me admitting to something I have never thought about in many a year. When I was six years old, I stole a packet of biscuits from a Galbraith’s mini supermarket. The biscuits were bite sized treats called Iced Gems. They were the size of a chocolate button; the base was made of a biscuit like rich tea in flavour, but it was thicker and lighter in colour. There was a piped swirl of set coloured icing on the top which came to a sharp point. I had just been to the paper shop to pick up my Beano and Dandy comics, so already had them folded over and gripped in my hand. I don’t think I knew what I was going to do before I went into the shop. I had never stolen anything before or since (that Guinness glass I got attached to one St Patrick’s night doesn’t count right?). Heart beating out of my chest, I took the small packet of biscuits off of the shelf, and when I was sure that nobody was looking, I quickly hid them in the folds of the comics. I walked over to the stack of blue crates and picked up a bottle of milk before heading over to the counter to pay.
I paid for the milk, then gripping my comic tightly to my chest, I left the shop with my heart racing and my stomach churning. Once out of the sight of the shop window, all of the nervous energy went to my legs, and I ran faster than I had ever run before or since. I ran along the road and into the park, and when I eventually realised that there was nobody running after me, I slowed down to a clumsy stride, and the nervous energy gone, I flopped dramatically onto the grass. I sat up after a minute or two and then slowly opened the comics and took out the packet. I held the little square packet up to the light and looked at the colourful treats. Instead of being clean, shiny little gems, they were floured and dusty where I had gripped the comic so tightly that I had crushed some of them. Feeling somewhat sick from the run, probably the adrenaline and most definitely the guilt of what I had done, I decided not to open them there and then so took them home and hid them under my bed.
That morning just before all of this, my Mum and Dad had both sat with me at the breakfast table. This never happened. Mum always seemed to be in a state of perpetual motion and Dad, if he was home through the day, was usually in his chair reading his paper or a book. They both smiled at me as they sipped their tea and then Mum said lightly almost too lightly “how would you like a sister or two?”
Even although I was only six I knew about babies, not how they were made but for sure I knew how they came into the world. I lived next door to five girls and saw at least two of them carried and then appear. Although I didn’t know the actual mechanics of the birth, I got it that they were in the tummy, and then they came out. Two at a time, though, this was a new concept for me, and I knew you couldn’t choose boy or girl because people were always saying to the man next door “fingers crossed for a boy this time, Glenn, eh!”
“How will you have two at once Mum,” I asked “and how can you be sure we get girls?” They both looked at me grinning from ear to ear. Dad laughed out loud and then Mum said gently, “no silly, were thinking of adopting two little girls. They have lost their mummy, and we thought you might like it if they lived here with us too” They were both staring at me like the dog did when I was eating something, so I looked down at my knees.
“Well,” Mum said bringing her face down to mine “would you like that, some sisters?” I thought for a minute and then said “can I pick a name for one of them?” Dad smiled at me ” they have names pet, it’s a Mum and Dad they need” he said, forgetting to add a sister to that grouping.
“Where would they sleep,” I asked.
“We would put bunk beds into your room, and they could sleep in there with you.”
Already they were a pair and for the first time, I felt like a single. I looked up at my parents who were both looking at me now with concern, and I felt my world, such as it was, shift right there and then.
“that would be great,” I said, “Can I please have pocket-money for my comics?”
I am sure what occurred was driven by the very primitive instinct of worrying about resources (food and space) and being usurped as this new family dynamic crashed into my consciousness. I did the best that a 6-year-old could do with all of these thoughts. Although I had no words or abilities to analyse my situation, I remember that my previously assured certainty about my world, it’s parameters and where I fitted in, was rocked.
These instinctual responses to change are easier to see and analyse in small children as they don’t have the sophistication of thought required to spin and play a situation to their advantage. They cannot yet use strategy or subtlety and so react instinctually instead. My place in my family tribe was threatened, and I altered when alteration came. As I thought back on these events throughout my life, my real understanding of what occurred only came to me when I came across Dave Logan’s – Leadership of Tribes – which details tribes, and the levels at which they operate. In essence, he explains;
Level one tribes live in the space of: ‘I’m crap, and the world is crap’ Here lies all that is bad about people. In the work arena, employees may; steal , cause havoc and can even be violent or volatile.
Level two: The world goes on without me and I am crap. Here teams are passive aggressive and really resistant to change of any type.
Level Three: I am great but everyone else is crap. Here lies the ‘knowledge is power’ brigade, and those people (who make up the majority of the workforce) who are in it for themselves and their own betterment and advancement.
Level 4: Here the story is that WE are great: Teams in this zone are enthused to work together for the advancement of the company and the greater good.
Level 5: These people work for the better of the world, the message here being ‘life is great’. i.e. Kofi Annan, Ban Ki Moon, Mahatma Gandhi etc
Back when I was six, I was too young to comprehend what was going on, but in our wee home and in terms of our family tribe, I had gone from a level 4 tribe member, to a level 1, overnight. It took me through my whole childhood to climb back to where all was good.
As I matured and moved into business, I sat at a level 3 for most of my professional career relishing in my personal achievement’s encouraged by working for organisations that celebrated and rewarded individual and not team excellence. It wasn’t until I set up my own companies that I realised that without my team operating at level 4 we would never achieve truly amazing results. So at NT we work to inspire each other to be more selfless in order to keep our culture right. We work hard to support and lift each other to all that we aspire to be. We use our words carefully to build our reality and then work together for the sum of the whole.
Luckily we learned this lesson very quickly from the onset. We had an associate in our early days who while working with a client uncovered another work requirement for the client’s organisation. This piece of work was not within her core skill base and we had two more capable candidates for the task at hand and yet she brokered a contract for the work and then kept it to herself. She went on to do an ‘OK’ job, and after the work was finished, the contract with the client (and us) ended, and we as a company picked up no more work from that source. You see the client didn’t just want and ‘OK’ job, they wanted an exceptional job and ‘therein lies the rub’. Had she brought this work back to the team and worked with us to identify, plug in and support the best resource for the job, together we could have delivered the exceptional results we strive to deliver, and grown our relationship with this client to the benefit of us all. We work solidly to make great things happen and sometimes this means that we will have to say ‘NO’ to contracts in areas that we cannot deliver excellence in ‘OK’ not being good enough. We have so many connections across our network and industry, that hopefully between us we can identify and recommend the right resource to meet our client’s needs. We will say with integrity and conviction ‘we can’t do that for you, but let us recommend a man that can’. Could this be networking’s true worth? I think it could be.
Welcome! To be in our network is to be in our tribe, and I can honestly say that I got a bigger kick out of the first few hundred pounds that one of my team earned than anything I ever earned for myself.
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