How the Principle of Alloys Works with Relationships and Team Building

1 + 1 = 2. 

That shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to most readers, just hear me out. While this principle works when doing your first grade math homework, it doesn’t always apply in real life. Knowing how to combine things and people to make something greater than the sum of its parts is a master-level management skill in every part of your life.

This is the principle of alloys. In engineering, you make an alloy by combining metal with another element. This creates some of the most important material in our modern world, like steel.

Steel, in its simplest form, is iron mixed with carbon. The result is something much stronger than either component. It doesn’t rust as easily as iron, and it performs much better under tension and compression.

To put it another way, an allow takes 1 + 1 and turns it into 3. To do this in your life, you just have to pick the right 1’s.

Why Alloys Are Your Ally

When building a team or a community, you need to make an alloy. 

If you are working on a project that requires a lot of coding, you hire programmers. But do you seek out programmers who all have similar backgrounds and experiences? No.

Teams are such powerful problem solvers because you can gather people with all different kinds of traits and hard earned know-how. When people face challenges, they come up with solutions. And the more they encounter the same kind of challenge, the more honed and brilliant those solutions become. Soon, it’s second nature to solve.

So when we build teams, you radically expand your capabilities by bringing in people who have perfected different sets of solutions.

It’s still important that there’s some common ground, too. In the alloy metaphor, you aren’t making steel by combining mined ore with a poem. In your team, members have to be compatible enough to understand what the other is saying, but not so compatible that they finish each other's sentences.

So in our example, you hire coders who know how to work in the programming language you’ll be using. But they should have different experiences with what they’ve applied that language to.

How to Know You’ve Made an Alloy

So how do you know you’ve made an alloy?

Sometimes, you just know. There are people who make you excited to get to work on the common goal, and you can have discussions with them that continue to improve the project. If you are having a great time while doing great work, you have an alloy.

But there are subtler varieties. If you have team members who become go-to resources for certain problems, you are likely on the right track. If there are tasks that bring multiple team mates together and they hit it out of the park, we’re in alloy territory.

Finding the right mix is art more than science, but the alloy is a powerful way to look at what you are trying to do. When you bring an individual into the team, what do they have that no one else does? What do they need that you can offer? The more answers you have to both these questions, the better the fit.

And then, like steel, your team will be tougher and perform better than any member could on their own. Or maybe, just maybe, you made 1 + 1 = 3.