Being a team player is an overvalued quality. Whenever you are told by someone with a higher status than you to “do the right thing by being a team player”, it typically means to do what is in the best interests of the person making the statement. You hear such statements all the time from mediocre managers in companies as well as from teachers and parents. In many instances they mean well and have good intentions, but the problem is that doing what they say will end up setting you back rather than helping you.
If you build a highly in-demand product, for example, and did practically all the work, you should not permit anyone else to take credit for it. This entails a lot of effort as everyone will try to affiliate with your product to the point where you will need to actively force people out. This might entail emails/text messages declaring that XYZ people did not contribute in any way to direct F2F conversations to ensure that some business entity does not use your product as part of their marketing material.
Yes, being a team player can mean marking down yourself which will cost you many millions of dollars in the long run.
Framework For Claiming Credit
1) Performance Over Sabotage: Before we delve further into this topic we want to first clarify that our message isn’t to encourage you to go and inflict damage to people who are taking credit for your work. 9/10 people think like this which is precisely why they will never be successful. When we state that you should avoid becoming a committed team player we simply mean that you should always be ready, capable and willing to take 100% of the credit for your own contributions. Don’t exaggerate or diminish your contribution. The further up you progress within the corporate world the more frequently you will be asked to make unfair sacrifices and hand over credit to people who didn’t achieve anything. Even assuming you are able to make a successful exit and build your own product/service, people will still try to get credit they don’t deserve. They will insist that their design is the main reason why your product is selling so fast, even though you have A/B testing results substantiating that it wasn’t a key driver of the top line. So to repeat again: Do not try to screw over anyone, but let your performance do the talking and then aggressively claim all credit that you deserve.
2) Don’t Try to Teach/Fix Other People: Successfully implementing long-term positive transformations in other people is one of the most challenging tasks out there for the simple reason that it is a near impossible feat. Once someone’s mind is made up on an important issue (especially one that directly affects his own life), changing his mind can be harder than trying to use your body to stop a locomotive hurtling forward at full speed. 99% of people are resistant to any form of change that involves additional near- to medium-term effort and sacrifices, while the remaining 1% have the internal willpower and will succeed irrespective of whether you intervene or not.
This can be applied to business too. One thing to always keep in mind is that all customers come and go at some point, including the most loyal and committed ones. Unless you screwed up an order, in which case you should immediately throw some freebies in, it is typically the customer who is in the wrong. This is an enduring trend we have observed. Whenever a customer complains based on a faulty premise, it is because his life has gone in the wrong direction. As long as this faulty premise is visible, don’t try to change the person as it will just turn out to be a waste of time. You will be far better off searching for and marketing your product/service to potential customers who like the direction you are headed.
The same can also be said for regular life. If someone doesn’t like you from the very first meeting, don’t bother trying to change his/her mind. Move on to the remaining seven billion people you have yet to meet. Chances are there will be plenty among this group who will be interested in forming a constructive relationship with you.
3) If It Isn’t Important Don’t Share It: An extremely overlooked principle in business is to avoid sharing inconsequential information. Nobody likes that long email chain regarding some trivial issue that took up an entire afternoon which could have been resolved over a couple of one-liner text messages. This is bad practice for both your career and business aspirations and you don’t want to be the initiator of time-wasting agendas. So if you don’t have anything valuable to add, then don’t say anything at all. Over time this will transform you into a higher value contributor during conversations and meetings as it will force you to find a way to be more innovative and interesting. Now here’s a short exercise: Write down a list of the top five smartest people you personally know as well as the top five dumbest. Now compare how much you hear the individuals within the two groupings typically talk. We wager that the dumb group will win by a country mile as smart people usually only talk when they have something constructive to say.
4) Affiliate Yourself With Winners: This is what office politics is all about, especially when you work for a large firm where sizable opposing camps inevitably form. Ideally, you want to figure out who the main winners in your office are within the first week on the job, all while simultaneously avoiding any entanglement in time-wasting office politics. While it may seem like an easy way to build rapport with seemingly important people, do not fall into this trap as once you get in you won’t be able to crawl back out. Instead, once you find out who the real winners are you will build rapport with them by finding out what tasks/projects you can work with them on and then deliver effective results. As mentioned above, make sure you receive your fair share of credit. While we did say that being a team player is overrated, you want to strike the right balance at times as it can be extremely difficult to scale anything on your own. Once you are in a position of power, you want to hire others who can contribute a lot and give them the credit they deserve. This is the key: You want to be recognized as the manager who hired an extremely talented and high-performing individual (or even better a team). If you and the person you hired successfully delivered a project on time and under budget and each contributed 50/50, then you will receive a promotion for your skills in synthesis (determining the right person to hire and matching him into the right role).
5) Reaching Consensus: Even assuming you do all of the above, you can still get destroyed by not reaching a clear consensus. Yes, you read that right. Even if you don’t procrastinate/waste time, invest substantially in yourself, generate respectable income, affiliate yourself with winners, avoid the losers, you can still get burned. How?
Once you are in a key position of power within a firm, you will find yourself in high-priority meetings with other key decision-makers. As a general rule, whenever there are more than five people voting on your idea or proposal, there will always be at least one who will give you a negative for no reason other than because he doesn’t like you. The key is to figure out as early as possible who these people are (it’s not hard to tell as there will be many indications beforehand of their hostility) and then build strong consensus first with the other people ahead of time as well as the “main guy” who has the final say. Then when it comes time for the actual meeting this hostile minority of one or two guys will see the support you have from the others including the final decision maker and will be in a very weak position to challenge you as they will end up looking unreasonable.
How Things Could Go Wrong For You
1) HHH – Heavy Hitter Hostility: If someone multiple rungs above you on the corporate ladder dislikes you, then you should 100% leave the firm. Why? Simply because any credit you receive will get degraded. As soon as people find out that the top dog dislikes you, they will play down all of your accomplishments. It’s hard not to get frustrated when you find yourself in this kind of situation. You think “This is bull***. I did so much work and generated so much revenue for the firm but why am I receiving no credit?” The answer is simple. Since the rest of the team is aware that the higher up doesn’t like you, they know they can get away with stealing your credit as the higher up will believe that to be the consensus. This is one of those rare and unfortunate scenarios that is more or less insurmountable so your best bet would be to leave for another opportunity or put 5x more energy and time into your side business. The exception to this is if you are raking in a huge chest of $$$ that is far higher than the industry standard which you know you won’t be able to replicate anywhere else. In this case you just need to toughen up and stay with the firm for as long as possible until the income from your side business grows to the point where your fat paycheck no longer seems attractive.
2) Building & Promoting Your Product: Things can get really ugly here. Once you start building your own products and selling them you will look into outsourcing certain aspects of the work. The problem here is that it will take many months (and even years) of trial and error to find the right outsourcing partners. 99% of the time the outsourcing businesses will try to gouge you on the price by claiming that their enhancements to your product determine a large proportion of its value. It will be a nonstop battle until you come across reliable outsourcing partners who strike the right balance between good quality delivery and competitive pricing.
One thing to take note of here: Never relinquish control of your ads! One of the dumbest things you can do is to hand over the copywriting work to a third-party as it basically guarantees that your business is doomed to failure. The reason for this is because you have no way to measure how much value they are truly adding. The solution is to conduct your own individual ad campaign. This does not entail doing 100% of everything ad-related, just being the direct overseer of the paid traffic. When you are in control of the paid traffic you can conduct A/B testing to see if the people you paid to help you are truly generating a sufficient degree of value. If they claim that their work is increasing conversion rates by 15%, then you can personally test it to see if it holds true. Almost always it will not. In this situation you can either fire them or insist that they work for a lower rate that is more reflective of the value they are adding since you now have validation that the value they have been providing is not transformational.
3) Managing Multiple Successful Products: It is entirely possible to generate revenue up to the high seven figures alone, but above that number you will realize your time can be put to far better use by hiring someone. Naturally, this might not seem like an ideal arrangement. Hiring the right person can be incredibly difficult as the odds of picking a thoroughbred are very low. Expect to go through the hire/fire process four to five times before you come across a half-decent professional. If you have multiple products, look after the entire copywriting and advertising process along with the highest revenue-generating product, but pass on the lower revenue-generating products to the hire. Incentivize him by paying him commissions and bonuses based on the revenue growth. If he can pass this first test and bring the lowest revenue-generating product’s share in overall sales to 20-25%, feel free to pass new products over to him to look after. Continue to incentivize through performance-based pay.
4) Diagnose Product Deficiencies: This is more of an art than a science and is something you want to be really good at. When you are dealing with selling multiple products at the same time, you will need to pay extra attention towards finding any potential product holes. When it’s just one product this will be obvious, but when you are dealing with three or four products it is highly probable you will neglect one or more products with deficiencies that if resolved could prove to be very promising. When you have multiple lines of products, this will take up a huge chunk of your time every day as your competitors hit you from multiple angles. Every now and then, an opportunity to merge two products into one superior product will come up. If this is a viable solution that completely eliminates the main product holes and also allows you to be at the very forefront of a new and promising trend, then it should be a no-brainer to take the plunge.
5) Customer Service: This is the least enjoyable aspect of any business, particularly when you are a solo entrepreneur. But as horrible as it is, this is an area you want to deal with head-on for at least 12-18 months while you are still in the initial stages of building your business. This will give you a lot of direct insight into the deficiencies of your product as well as direct testimonials on any sort of competitive advantage your competitors may have. With that said, once you have sufficiently familiarized yourself in customer service you will want to offload it to someone else. This is an area where the majority of businesses are unwilling to invest in and end up hiring subpar quality talent. To do well, you want to do the reverse as you can derive huge value by hiring top-quality customer service representatives. This greatly improves the perception of both your product and your brand as well as the overall experience and loyalty of your customers. Most importantly, good customer service personnel will save you many headaches when it comes to low-value customer interactions.
Final Remarks
This post is pretty straightforward when it comes to how actionable the above items are. Some can be implemented immediately, such as not wasting any more time trying to change others or not sharing anything that is trivial/irrelevant and has the potential to make you look bad. Others will require a longer period of time before they can be applied. For example, when you find yourself spending day after day dealing with customer service and fixing seemingly unfixable product deficiencies you know you have partially made it because the majority of people reading this post will never get that far due to lack of internal drive and discipline.