In 2026, would you like to contribute to a book about ‘Skillful Collaboration’?
Barnabé Regan said YES!! And sent me this…
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Trust in Intergenerational Collaboration.
It is the beginning of August, 2023. I am on a family holiday with my parents and younger brother in Bayonne, a small city in Southwestern France. I was 17 years old at the time. Having a French mum, Elsa Regan-Klapisz, PhD, we visited France many summers throughout my youth (and still do). This trip was the first time I had brought my laptop with me to work.
About 10 months earlier, at the end of 2022 OpenAI launched ChatGPT. From that moment I started learning about AI and using it a lot. Towards the summer I had set up my new business: LevelHup. An AI consulting company, aiming to help coaches leverage AI in an authentic way.
Back to Bayonne. In our beautiful Airbnb apartment, I had the living room to myself in the afternoon for my first two introduction calls. One of them became my first client. Later he recommended me to more coaches and my small business journey had begun.
Now I’m 20, writing this 28 months after I signed my first client. In the meantime I have worked with many coaches, given workshops at many organisations (incl. startups, corporate & hospitals) and set up complex AI automation systems for multiple small businesses.
Most of the people I work with are 50+, which leads to a question that has crossed my mind many times: ‘’Why would they work with me?’’. It would sometimes even give me a feeling of self-doubt; There are many people out there with far more knowledge about AI, and that are far more credible than me. And yet, many Senior professionals chose to work with me; A young lad, who didn’t go study after high school and mostly learned from Youtube and doing.
So why? This is a very interesting question to me, and here are my reflections.
From my experience the answer is actually pretty simple: Trust. To me trust feels like a positive spiral. The people I collaborate with trust me, which gives me energy to work better, which then results in even more trust and so on.
Trust can bring collaboration a long way, but it is very hard to build in a world of power, in a world of me above you. In my experience, trust works best when we are at the same level. I have rarely felt like I was working “for” a Senior, it has always felt like working “with”.
So how do we build trust? If I reflect on all the introduction calls I have had, I notice that the times that trust gets established, it happens pretty fast. Most of the time after only chatting for a few minutes I could already sense if there was a feeling of trust or a feeling of “What is this young lad trying to sell me?” The latter would happen if I would follow sales tricks/talk that I had learned online. The former would happen if I was simply being myself, mostly by just being honest. In my experience this is ‘honesty’ the core of building trust.
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Wow! Proud Dad moment. :-))
Who’s next?
