In any kind of creative endeavor, there’s a place where the magic happens. When you hit that place, your work flows effortlessly, and your business can even become sublime. That’s the magic that we’re aiming for whenever we tackle a new project.
Hi, this is Steve Johnsen, and I want to talk to you about magic. Specifically, the magic that happens when you have a team that’s working on a project and things just start clicking. They start firing in unison, and the work just begins to flow. There’s a place where this magic happens, and it’s much more than the mechanical execution of the required steps. This kind of magic happens in music. It happens in coaching. It happens in sports. It can happen in your business. It can even happen with a good web design team.
If you were to describe a concert that you went to, you could talk about what all the people are doing individually. One person is rubbing some steel strings with a plastic pick, and another one is banging on a membrane with a stick. Another person might be making noise into a microphone. All true, but yet far from the truth. The elements involved in performing bad music are about the same as the elements in performing great music. But they’re so different! And that difference is the magic that I’m talking about.
That magic comes when everybody not only knows their job, but when there’s a kind of a connection between all the members of the team, between all the members of a band, or all the members of a sports team, or even between a coach and his client. You see, the magic is some kind of flow that begins to happen when everybody is doing a great job, and they’re doing it together.
We’ve all seen this happen in music. We’ve seen a choir or a band or orchestra come together and perform amazing, stunning music that is much more than the sum of the parts, and is much, much more than the execution of notes on the page with the instruments. You see this happen in sports. When a team comes together they can be a group of okay players, or they can be a group of great players. Or, there’s something more than a group of great players, and that is a great team. A great team functions as something that is much more than the sum of the parts.
When I was a kid I always liked watching the Globetrotters games on TV. The Harlem Globetrotters are a basketball team, and you can just see the connection that they have between them as they’re playing basketball. It’s almost like watching a dance, the way that they pass the ball around to each other and coordinate together, and each one knows where the other one’s going to be in the next move. And that is the magic that I’m talking about.
I see this in the business workplace as well. When I’m working with some of my coaching clients, that’s really what we’re going for. The coaching is not about me having some expertise that I can pass on, or some wisdom and knowledge that I can teach people, but rather it’s when my client and I get together and both of us come with an open mind and an open heart and an open inquiry, and we talk about some of their business challenges and goals and issues. And somehow in that discussion, many times it just starts clicking, and the magic comes out, and all of a sudden the ideas begin to flow, and together we come up with these amazing ideas that move the business forward and take it to a whole other level. And those ideas would never have come out of one person by themselves, but rather it’s the magic that takes place in that coaching conversation.
I see this happen in a number of small businesses that I work with. When you get the right team members in place, the right leadership, when you get the right mission and everybody’s clear and on board, and you get the right people and they’re trained, and they start clicking?my goodness! The result is so much more than the sum of the parts. And the business just seems like it flows effortlessly, and it’s even fun for people to come to work because of the team and the spirit and the camaraderie that taking place in the business.
We have the same thing happen when we approach a custom web design project. Good web design is comprised of a number of different disciplines and elements. It includes good communication verbally. It includes good strategy. It includes user interface design and really understanding the mindset of the ideal customer and how they’ll interface with the website. It involves a lot of technical knowledge of hosting and search engine optimization. It involves a lot of visual design skills and communicating things visually. And it involves coding?often in several different coding languages to make the website work right.
And those are not things that any one person is going to be good at across the board. So a really well-designed website is almost done by a team by definition. I’ve seen it happen where you pull together a good coder and a good writer and a good designer and a good SEO person and even a project manager, and somehow that team just doesn’t quite click. So there are all the elements, and each of the elements is done well. But somehow the end result is at best the sum of the parts. But I’ve also worked on many projects with a team at my company where everybody not only knows their business and is really, really good at it, but they really understand the team and how the team is going to function. And when we get into the project, and we bring the client into the team and make them part of the team, things just begin to click. And it just begins to flow, and all of a sudden the magic happens. And we see people getting excited about the website and how it communicates and how it connects with them personally and emotionally. And that’s the kind of magic that can also connect with a client.
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