Every kid learns it early. Share the shovel, or leave the sandbox.
No exceptions for the kid who builds the best castle.
Somewhere between kindergarten and the corner office, we forgot this.
The top performer who hoards information. The founder who can’t stand being questioned. The executive who wins the room by making everyone else smaller. We keep them. We promote them. We build comp plans around their output and quietly ignore the wreckage they leave behind.
A five-year-old gets removed from the sandbox for this. A VP gets a bonus.
Here’s the part that should bother you: talent was never the scarce resource. Trust was. A team that doesn’t trust each other doesn’t build anything that lasts, no matter how brilliant any one person in it is.
The sandbox wasn’t a lesson about sand. It was a lesson about other people. Play nice, or the other kids stop building with you. Eventually you’re building alone.
Look around your leadership team. Who’s still in the sandbox, and who’s one incident away from being asked to leave?
