Hidden Life

The best team.

By Matthew Laffer
January 28, 2022

The best team I ever worked with didn’t IPO, sell for billions, or win a championship. And they didn’t hire me to help them build a complementary team and enable collaborative leadership. In fact, I paid to have the privilege to observe them in the field.

Here are my top three observations:

1. The complementary nature of the team boosts its overall health and fertility.

There are no “yes men” on the team. Differences in style, ideas, experiences, and approaches are highly valued and create a deep wisdom and intelligence in their field. The more differences, the healthier and the more fertile is the team. Their growth is predictable. And the team knows when to bear fruit and when to plant new seeds.

2. The collaborative nature of the team forges their duality of giver and receiver into oneness.

Individuals on the team are social beings working together at all levels and are deeply connected. The team is ready, willing, and able to share resources, which means they’re able to effectively share risk by going deep on their learning and intelligence. By sharing resources, they increase their resilience. When an individual shares with another individual on the team, the team, the receiver, and the giver became stronger. The benefits of sharing accrue to all. *Study this well.*

3. The team is able to harness its energy so efficiently because of a culture of mutual trust and respect that was in their DNA from the seed stage.

The team wastes little energy. It knows precisely when, where, and how to allocate its energy, whether it be supporting others internally or defending against external threats. Most teams fail prematurely because they’re too busy wasting their energy with internal disintegration rather than external market integration. I believe this is because of a lack of mutual trust and respect amongst teams.

Have you guessed who this team is?

It’s a fully functional forest comprised of individual trees. This team gives endlessly for each other, breathes for each other, and lives and dies for each other. They also store and share energy with their community and are givers of life to the world. Trees are poster children for a team. If you want to understand how to build a complementary team, go learn from nature.

May we be more like the trees in our fields.

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A special thank you to Peter Wohlleben for sharing scientific discoveries and his deep love of the forest with me.

Matthew Laffer is a 3x entrepreneur and the Founder and CEO at Goalspriing.