The Hexagram That Got Me Paid: My Gathering Together Strategy
Man, I was stuck. For three years, I was that guy. Head down, crushing KPIs, delivering on time, doing exactly what they asked, and getting nowhere. I watched two separate rounds of promotions come and go, and my name was never on the list. I was the reliable, invisible workhorse. It really started to mess with my head. I was feeling isolated, like my effort was just disappearing into the corporate ether. I just kept thinking, “If I work harder, they have to see me, right?” Wrong. That just burned me out.
I finally hit a wall about six months ago. I needed a strategy change. I didn’t need a motivational poster; I needed something practical and outside the usual management books. So I dug out the I Ching, which I usually use more for just clearing my mind, not for actual career planning. I framed the question clearly: “What is the most effective action I can take right now to create momentum for a leadership promotion?”
I cast the sticks, and the answer I got was Hexagram 45, Cui, or “Gathering Together.”
Now, my first thought was, “Gather what? I’m leading a remote team across three time zones. We barely talk outside of standups.” But the commentary kicked my butt. It wasn’t about simply being together; it was about purposeful assembly under a strong, unified center. It was about finding the temple where everyone gathers and making sure that temple is structurally sound and well-stocked.
Shifting from Solo Hero to Organizer-in-Chief
I realized I was operating like a hero. I was solving everyone’s problems individually, passing information one-on-one, and generally keeping chaos at bay through sheer force of personal effort. That’s exhausting, and it’s also invisible to management.
Using Hexagram 45 as my actual playbook, I started tearing down my old habits and building the ‘temple.’ I focused entirely on synergy and visibility, not my personal output. Here’s exactly what I did, step by step, using the energy of “Gathering Together”:
- I stopped being the bottleneck. If someone asked me a question, instead of answering privately, I insisted on creating a quick, shared document on our internal wiki and tagging the three other people who might need that answer later. I forced the knowledge to gather in one place.
- I defined our common ‘sacrifice.’ The I Ching talks about the importance of holding a sacrifice (a shared purpose). For us, that purpose became fixing the clunky, awful hand-off process between the UX design team and the engineering implementation team. It was the biggest drain on company time, but nobody owned solving it.
- I organized the right people. I immediately stopped scheduling status meetings. Instead, I organized a new 45-minute weekly session I called the “Convergence Council.” I didn’t invite my direct reports; I invited the three people from other departments who were most affected by our messy hand-offs—the lead designer, the QA manager, and the product owner.
- I made them speak the same language. In those councils, I forced them to define terms. We had to agree on what “ready for dev” actually meant. This sounds basic, but getting that clarity meant everyone’s individual efforts suddenly started lining up perfectly, like a bunch of arrows pointing at the same target.
- I handed over the credit. Every single win, every time we improved efficiency, I wrote an internal email specifically detailing how the QA manager fixed this, or the designer streamlined that. I made sure to copy the department heads. My name was always the sender, but the success belonged to the assembled group.
The Payoff: Why Gathering Is Greater Than Grinding
The change was dramatic. Within four weeks, our friction points dropped by 60%. The team I didn’t even formally manage was suddenly operating like a single, well-oiled machine. The noise level around these cross-departmental projects just disappeared. Silence, in the corporate world, is often the sound of success.
Management noticed the systemic improvement. They weren’t seeing me as the guy who fixed a lot of bugs. They were seeing me as the person who eliminated the conditions that created the bugs in the first place. I had successfully assembled a high-performing unit focused on a core organizational problem.
Three months after I started implementing the Hexagram 45 strategy, I got the call. They weren’t looking for a better Senior Manager; they needed a Director of Cross-Functional Operations. They created the role based on the systemic improvements I had initiated. I wasn’t promoted for my individual skill; I was promoted for my ability to facilitate, unify, and center the collective power of the people around me.
That’s the core lesson I pulled from that old book. In today’s big company structures, individual brilliance only gets you so far. True, scalable success, and the promotions that follow, come from being the center point that intentionally and wisely gathers people, resources, and knowledge for a shared, visible victory. Stop grinding solo, start gathering.
