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Teamwork Requires Selflessness

I recently experienced a very disturbing, unethical and disheartening experience with a friend. It has been more than a month now and till this day, I have great difficulty saying anything about it. Only the friends that I am close with or working with know about this and even then, I have avoided naming the person who have hurt me.

I have trust issues and if there was anything I could derive out of this episode, it is that I have found a way out of this issue.

This person have communicated to me that there are friends who are not friends...they are feeding their ego even when you are genuine in helping them. He was in a financial rut (so he says, I have no way to confirm this) so, I genuinely hired him. It was all genuine and I had no idea what was going through his head.

In my profession, the worst thing you can ever do is to plagiarize. This is a huge NO for me! I mean, it is wrong to copy from anyone in ANY industry, no?! Please correct me if I am wrong. Unless your job is to copy, that is. But in this case, I did not hire him to copy other people's work.

It was a huge letdown mainly because I trusted him. I put aside all the uncomfortable things that he have said to me and entrusted him with my work. But he thought it was OK to sledgehammer me to the side of the head.

For the month after the confrontation, I have asked myself where I went wrong. I can't fix his laziness and unethical beliefs but I want to know what made it easy for him to karate kick me. I want to fix that. I want to fix me even when he does not want to fix his attitude. So, while fixing all the damage that he has done to me (trust me, all the stuff that went out, I had to go after them and fix all of that), I reflected and asked myself if I should stop trusting people.

Being a Leo, loyalty is very precious to me. It will take me forever to commit to anything (it used to be easier to earn my loyalty. Life taught me well) but when I do, I want to know I am in this for the long haul. I want to give you everything I have to give without asking anything back in return except for your genuine commitment and care.

What this has taught me is that I need to be more selective, base my decisions on ability and sincerity, not just sympathy. I am not the charitable organization that I sometimes can behave like. I need team members and not people who talk cheap, are egoistic and manipulative. I need team members who can communicate openly with me.

Team members who understand, can see, and have the same desire and concern for the well-being for the team. Team members who see me not as a 'boss' but a leader who is in the same boat with them. Team members who will not bail on me, will admit mistakes, nor will they compromise the work of the other team members.

Team members who sees the whole big picture.

So, should I stop trusting others? Nah. I have learned this lesson well and know what to look for when recruiting people into my team, not just because you are in a hard place and I am here to offer you a rope. You are in a hard place, so am I! Who isn't?! I am not going to allow you to jeopardize everyone else with your selfishness.

Teamwork requires, if nothing else, selflessness.


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