MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS

At every level of education, in every single class I've been in, there has always been a group of students that just seem to easily ace exams and get the best results.

It always amazed me how we could all attend the same lectures, read the same books and take the same exams, but not get the same results, because these guys scored the highest regardless of the subject.

These were the brilliant ones, the geniuses, who often required a lot less effort to get a lot more marks.

A lot more marks...

What exactly was their secret to success? Were they more hardworking or just more brilliant?

At primary and secondary level, I conceeded to the latter. But it wasn't like I had a choice because the entire school system was structured to rank students by performance and use said performance to determine their level of brilliance. Which means you were more brilliant than your peers if your results in last session's examinations were better than others.

Results were the only way to prove you were brilliant. So, we all got naturally competitive and studied harder, aiming to dethrone whoever was sitting comfortably atop the brilliance index.

But with all that hard work, we couldn't knock them off the podium. Those guys just kept scoring higher and higher marks, setting new records each term. To the point that in a subject some were getting every mark available, in the tests, assignments and exams. Leaving nothing on the table for their teachers. A hundred marks out of a hundred!

It was at this point that we all had to admit that these guys were unbeatable.

Then, university came along and it seemed like the same old story. I met another brilliant bunch, another set of guys outdoing the rest of the class each time the exams came around.

But this time it was different, this time the stakes were higher, a couple of bad results and you could fall too far behind to graduate. So, we were more desperate and more humble. It therefore, became less about competing and more about collaborating... Collaborating to survive.

We got closer to these brilliant ones and became their pupils. Then, each one of us figured out our areas of strengths and weaknesses, and plugged them into the school survival ecosystem. You became a tutor in the courses you were strong in and a pupil in those you were weak in.

That was when we discovered that these brilliant ones, weren't brilliant in all the courses. They were great in the areas of their strength, but weren't so great in the few areas they didn't have affinity for.

Soon, a new crop of brilliant guys started emerging, guys that knew how to get the knowledge required to pass whatever exams were in front of them. A shift had hit the brilliance index and those we had looked up to as brilliant at the onset, weren't so superhuman anymore. Their formular had been cracked, their aura had been demystified.

Within this symbiotic school system, there were buffers set in place to forestall failure. Tutorials went on throughout the semester, simplified notes were always in circulation and study groups met frequently to sharpen their sabres.

This was a microcosm of an ideal society, one were entrepreneurial tutors and charitable study partners provided the innovative solutions to meet the needs of their fellowmen.

Everyone now had a fair shot at life, liberty and the pursuit of academic success.

But as soon as we departed the utopian society created on campus, and stepped into the real world, we were quickly reminded that man isn't naturally collaborative, and that social stratification, just like the class ranking we experienced in primary and secondary school was hardwired into society to feed his appetite for competition.

For some strange reason, the absense of class ranking in the university even though the stakes were higher, had not only made us more collaborative, but also more innovative; innovation that spread beyond the classroom into the hostel, labs and fields, as many students became inventors and businessmen.

Yes, there was social hierarchy on campus, that can never be avoided in any gathering of human beings, but it never spread to the academic pursuit of the students, as performance rewards only came at convocation, not every semester or session.

Moving from school campus to the workplace, we discovered that rather than mimic the campus, the workplace was more like the real society, more like what we knew in secondary school.

Most employers stratify the workplace and then demand more collaboration from their employees. Many performance appraisals only reward individuals for group achievements, giving the Ballon d'Or to the staff with the most goals whilst forgetting the hardworkers who keep the company going. This only builds fierce rivalries, where all the health will eventually get sucked out of the competition when co-workers start sabotaging eachothers' spreadsheets!

So much for an ideal society, many of such workplaces are edging closer to anarchy by the day.

Dear founder, don't build an animal kingdom in your workplace. You can't build a stratified workforce and then ask them to have an open clan-like collaborative culture.?

You can't tell a lion that he is king of the jungle and then ask him to collaborate with animals below him in the food chain. So, don't ask the same favour from those you've crowned king of the workforce. Instead, create an environment where cooperation is rewarded and everyone's contribution is acknowledged. Create that ideal society within your company walls and preach holism.

This way you'll have a strong team working together to win together and the organisation will be the better for it.

To your success,

Olayinka A. Williams?

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Copyright ? 2022 Olayinka A. Williams - All rights reserved.