Your Bandwidth & Your Strengths

I want to talk about the power of delegating and collaboration on this blog post.

As well as exchanging skills to lift each other without exploiting each other.

A lot of us grew up under the toxic notion that we need to get out of people what we can in the shortest period of time. I challenge this. If you can get something of value out of a person, there’s more where that came from – harness it.

I’ll give you an example:
My husband, Neo, and I had many struggles with domestic assistance at the beginning of our parenting journey. We had a stable domestic worker who cleaned and tidied up AND looked after the kids. She knew we depended on her because it was only her. She looked after the kids when we had long work days and tidied the house. So slowly she would ‘remove’ herself and ask for more days off because she was ‘tired’. We did so. Until it became problematic and she wouldn’t return on time, therefore inconveniencing us. This got toxic and LISTEN… it was real!

I document that here: Nanny Break Ups 

Introspecting

We did a lot of introspecting after this ordeal and here are mistakes we made:

1. We assumed she was toxic before checking our own toxicity.
     a. One person with many roles, some of which we did not fully discuss expectations of
     b. Not reviewing and checking in on changes in expectations

2. Increasing pay without bandwidth just puts a plaster on deep wound. Money does not solve our needs. Compensating people fairly is important, but you cannot just pay people to solve your issues without communicating what it is you need assistance with and measuring their bandwidth and skill sets.

3. We disempowered her. She ended up being a doer of everything but excellent at very little. If you have ever been taken advantage of at a corporate job, you will know the feeling of sitting in a year-end review and you worked so hard during the year but when reviewed on your work, it hits you – “I have been so busy and hectic but have seemingly been doing other people’s work, and very little of mine”

4. When you are at a place where you have/ may have a better EQ, use it to empower the next person. There was no way she was going to identify her frustration when we live in a society that exploits people for immediate gain. 

I remember during the period I was going through all this nanny drama and frustration, hubby and I had a sit down and one of the questions was around boundaries and defining what the role of the people that work for us is and how we can better break it down into pockets and then compensate them accordingly. Allow them to up-skill in their spaces (via training, courses and acknowledgement), and always say thank you.

The Things We Normalise & Internalise

I grew up in a space and time where parents were obligated to help and have people (family, friends, distant relatives, church people, pastors… the list goes on) show up at your front door and you just had to get on with things. We would have people live with us, in our home, at times for lengthy periods with no defined boundaries. This became a norm. I internalised and normalised it.

My husband on the other hand had a mom who drew the line and defined things VERY clearly. She was strict too. So we meet, start a family and we are figuring each other out, and then later children are in the mix.

What comes first and what can take the backseat? What resources do we need to thrive? What does society say? What do you place as priority in your day to day? What are your blind spots?

We will also further elaborate on this assistance one needs in the form of partnership and/or accountability partners and identifying blind spots, but for this blogpost, we’ll focus on bandwidth and strengths.

In this week’s newsletter I wrote:

Identify your weaknesses on this journey. To unlock your abundance and ability to be and live in fullness you need to know your blind spots. When we understand this, we remove envy and understand how the universe can conspire with us and for us to achieve our dreams if we know how to play our strengths instead of envying or being frustrated at someone else’s strengths.

 

Finding Alignment

So this is ultimately how we (my husband and I) managed to find the alignment of our bandwidth & our strengths in order to productively manage our home and businesses:

1. Values – there definitely needs to be a crossover of values and value systems

2. Being Openminded – remain open minded to the approach. The end goal is most often than not the same if your value systems align, but the approach may be different. Remain open minded

3. Emotional Maturity – when it comes to outsourcing help along the way, know that emotional maturity levels are not the same. And this is okay. But you need to acknowledge and know this, it will lessen your frustrations.

4. Adaptability – adapt if things don’t go your way. We spoke about being quick on your feet in the previous blog post. Be flexible and adaptable.

5. Its healthy to debate – Always allow other views to come into your periphery. You don’t know what you don’t know – I live by these words. Debate with the people around you. Debate with your partner. Keep an open mind. Keep light on your feet (and mind). Acknowledge if you didn’t think of something in the way they have. This is so progressive, it feels so good knowing you’ve grown in mindset. Set pride aside.

6. One person in the mix must be organised – Listen… bandwidth needs someone to be organised. I am (thankfully) the organised one in my relationship.

7. Communicate – And communicate with love and kindness always. You give what you’ve gotten. You also get what you give. We all have a little toxicity and trauma we carry in us. That thing can affect the way you communicate. I gave the people around me (colleagues, employees, friends…) the silent treatment when I needed to communicate. That’s what I knew. But effective communication needs to come from a place of “will my words leave the next person better than I found them?” If the answer is no.

Ask someone to help you vent, then filter, and then communicate.

These things have worked for me over the most recent years and I still continue to work on them, because if I want to be productive, the power of delegating and collaborating lies in partnership and playing on everyone’s strengths. We exchange skills, expose each other to skills to lift each other, not to exploit each other.

This I feel equally applies to our work relationships too. 

Let me know your thoughts below.