You wouldn\u2019t call the coyote and the badger friends.\u00a0 Both are relatively fierce creatures, and there\u2019s very little that is friendly about them.\u00a0 In the arid American Southwest, they actually compete for the same scarce food \u2013 mostly rodents, and birds.<\/p>\n
But despite the competition, the fact is the coyote and the badger are competitive allies who work together in a profitable collaboration.\u00a0 And there is much we can learn from them.<\/p>\n
If you\u2019ve ever tried to catch a rodent (think of Bill Murray\u2019s character in Caddyshack), you know how difficult it can be.\u00a0 First, they are fast.\u00a0 Second, they are excellent at scampering into little, hard-to-reach places.\u00a0 And third, they do most of their scampering and devious deeds late at night, when it\u2019s hard to see them.\u00a0 As for catching birds, well, that flying thing gives them a definite advantage.\u00a0 You have to be quick to catch them before they\u2019re off and out of reach.<\/p>\n
The badger and the coyote know all of this.\u00a0 And unlike we humans \u2013 who tend to think that because we\u2019re good in one area we are likely to be good in another \u2013 the badger and the coyote instinctively know their limitations.\u00a0 This is the root of their collaboration \u2013 the coyote knows he is not good at burrowing and the badger knows he\u2019s not quick.\u00a0 To make up for their inadequacies (alas, we all have them), they choose to work together. In fact, the coyote is more likely to choose to hunt with a badger than to go it alone or with another of his own species.\u00a0 And he is rewarded for this decision \u2013 his badger collaboration enables him to catch up to thirty percent more food than he alone or with another coyote can catch.<\/p>\n
Wouldn\u2019t we all love thirty percent more?\u00a0 With an extra third, oh the things we could do \u2013 or buy, or have, or give.\u00a0 But, more often than not, we tend to think that because we have been successful in the past, in order to be more successful we need to collaborate with others who are very much like us.\u00a0 Unlike the coyote and the badger, we focus on our strengths and not our inadequacies.\u00a0 I suspect that humans are actually hard-wired to prefer people with similar personality types as collaboration partners.<\/p>\n
Fortunately, we also have the capacity to learn, to be objective and to imagine a future that is different from our past.<\/p>\n
One client with whom we work has done this well.\u00a0 They are, by all measures, a successful company \u2013 a national engineering firm that has withstood the economic downturn, they were just ranked the 2011 #1 Best Large Employer to Work for in New York State \u2013 quite an accomplishment in these challenging times.\u00a0 But they are still not satisfied.<\/p>\n
The company\u2019s recent focus has been on appreciating staff diversity.\u00a0 They realize that a firm full of engineers may tend to look at things from one perspective \u2013 an engineer\u2019s.\u00a0 And they believe that to continue to be successful, they need to seek out diverse perspectives.<\/p>\n
They know this won\u2019t be easy.\u00a0 People with different perspectives often don\u2019t see eye-to-eye, and when you have people around who don\u2019t see eye-to-eye, you tend to have conflict.\u00a0 The truth is, most people want to avoid that.\u00a0 But conflict that is the result of sharing differing opinions can be both healthy and necessary, provided that it is all in the context of a shared common goal or objective.<\/p>\n
This is the best example that the badger and the coyote can give us.\u00a0 They don\u2019t \u201clike\u201d each other.\u00a0 When the badger chases a prairie dog out of its hole and watches the coyote gobble up what should rightfully be his, the collaboration probably looks like a bad deal to him.\u00a0 But on those other occasions when the prairie dog sees the coyote and decides not to leap into its waiting jaws \u2013 and thereby remains in his burrow \u2013 then the badger gets his meal and realizes how beneficial it is to have the coyote as a partner.\u00a0 They seek the same objective \u2013 more food.\u00a0 And because of their collaboration, they each get it.<\/p>\n
Yes, there are a lot of things we can learn from the coyote and the badger.\u00a0 Chief among them is the fact that even competitors with few shared likes or traits can be successful collaborators if they respect their differences and share a common goal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
You wouldn\u2019t call the coyote and the badger friends.\u00a0 Both are relatively fierce creatures, and there\u2019s very little that is friendly about them.\u00a0 In the arid American Southwest, they actually compete for the same scarce food \u2013 mostly rodents, and birds. But despite the competition, the fact is the coyote and the badger are competitive […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"yoast_head":"\n