Two days ago I made a pretty significant presentation to a client. It was a presentation that I had spent literally months working on; in fact, the first day I walked into the office, one of my bosses jokingly asked me if I had finished the strategy yet. Eager to impress, I walked back to my desk and got started on it. That was October 4th. I presented it on February 16th.

Looking at the folder where I store them, I count eleven iterations of the presentation. That’s how I work — I version out documents so I can go back and see how my thinking has changed as the end product evolves. The fact that there are 11 versions of this Powerpoint deck means that it went through at least ten rounds of revision of varying levels of formality.

It also means that there were a lot of people who helped shape the final presentation. Six team members made significant contributions on the agency side, and a handful of people on the client side gave their input as well. It was an amazing team effort, and I’m really happy with the end result: 80 amazing slides that we were able to power through in 45 minutes, laying out our strategic social vision for the next 12-18 months. Great stuff.

But getting there was hard work. And even though this project was my baby, and I was the one who presented it to the client, it felt wrong somehow to take all the credit for it. So I wrote a quick thank you note to all the people who had helped, both on the client side and the agency side.

But here’s the thing. Back in October, I had this vision of me crafting this thing on my own, presenting it to the client, knocking off socks, and being carried out of the conference room Rudy-style. I wanted to be the hero. The whole thing was my idea. Dammit, didn’t I deserve a little glory for all that hard work?

Well, not really. See, the deeper I get into social media, the more I’m coming to understand that what I’m suggesting isn’t really original. It’s common sense kind of stuff, once you start thinking about it. It’s really my job to tell the client what they already know: that we should be finding more effective ways to communicate with people, and that social media presents an opportunity for us to do that.

And once people stop thinking about social media as a collection of properties and start thinking about it as a set of behaviors, the work going forward becomes much easier. The hard work comes in getting people to believe that social media has more to do with the people who use Facebook than Facebook itself. And, as it happens, getting people to believe something is the part I’m not yet terribly good at.

Recognizing your shortcomings is not always easy, and it often takes a humbling experience to confront them. Fortunately for me, I have a team who was more than capable of crafting a compelling story from the elements that I supplied. That’s the value of working with a team — no one person is a complete package, and you need other people to fill the gaps.

I sent the thank you note because I know that in order to do great work, I have to work with the right people. Showing appreciation for people who do the work that makes “your” work truly shine is a great team building exercise. Now I know that the next time I need to ask one of these fine folk to work with me, I know I’ve done my best to leave a good impression about our last collaboration experience. That means we’ll all approach the work with a brighter outlook, and hopefully do better work.

The work we do is often made possible by the work that others do. Take a minute today to thank someone who makes the work you do really shine. Who will you thank today?