The leader has always been expected to play a pivotal role in making things work in the team. He does this by guiding its resources and creative potentials to deliver the outcomes expected from him to justly for the existence of the team.
To deliver these outcomes, it is always thought that one of the key roles and responsibilities of the leader is to develop his team so that its members acquire the skills and competencies necessary for its success.
However, as more Generation Y’s begin their careers in the workplace, this traditional perspective is fast becoming obsolete. Generation Y recognises the importance of being employable and trusted by their superiors, and is more likely to leave if these growth and independence factors are missing at the workplace.
Given these inclinations, it is no longer true that the success of the team is entirely dependent on the effectiveness of its leader. Each member in the team wants a say about the future of the team. They want to lead at the appropriate moment. They want to contribute as thinking value-adding entities rather than a mere factor of production.
Given this atmosphere of change, new competencies and practices of a team member begin to emerge and these are the ability to:
- Tap into the wisdom of the crowd
- Celebrate contributions authentically
- Understand ourselves
- Leverage on the diversity around us
- Being heedfully considerate
- Continuously acknowledge, accept, and inspire the Self
- Honour our words
Tap into the Wisdom of the Crowd
The democratisation of information and knowledge, and the freedom of labour to bring their talent to where knowledge could be created are changing the world. This is globalisation. These are the effects of the Internet and mindsets of Generation Y, who are beginning to dominate the workplace.
This means knowledge and talent no longer a privilege only available and accessible to a few. The power has shifted into the hands of the majority. This is community power in action and it means that information, knowledge and talent is freely available out there. We need to know the methods to tap into this wisdom to be successful.
We need to recognise this phenomenon. We need to acquire a mindset that is congruent with the world and skills to collect and expand knowledge. One of such skills is the facilitation of conversations with others.
There are two basic elements in facilitating a conversation - Questioning and Paraphrasing.
In questioning, we use a number of questioning techniques to draw our counterpart into a conversation and in the process we uncover his intensions and learn of his knowledge. In paraphrasing, we summarise pieces of the conversation in our words and present it back to the audience for verification, confirmation and expansion.
When we are able to do these effectively and do them regularly, we are more capable of uncovering the opportunities of creating breakthroughs in our endeavours.
Celebrate Contribution Authentically
When we celebrate success, we make an attempt to present a deserving individual on stage to an audience and to have him receive an award from someone senior in the organisation to recognise, honour and celebrate his deeds. We spend time, efforts and money to recognise and reward individuals who had done a really good job. However, this is not an authentic celebration and the awardees know it. They is not stupid. Why is this so?
This is because we celebrate his success in our perspective as organisers of the event. In doing so, the celebration is not about him. The event is actually meant for us to demonstrate to the world that we are an enlightened organisation. We are celebrating for our sake and not for anyone else. This is inauthentic.
To truly celebrate, we have to understand the awardees’ reasons for wanting to be honoured. To answer this question, we need to ask 'why do we want to be celebrated?'
We want to be celebrated because we crave for positive feedback and affirmation from others. We want to know if we are moving in the right direction. A positive feedback is a strong incentive for inspiring us to do better and an affirmation is enough to motivate us to commit further. We stay driven this way.
Feedback and affirmation that inspires and creates aspirations are usually expressed in language. However, many organisations choose not to feedback or affirm in the most powerful way. Instead, they create symbols in their place; in the forms of scrolls, plaques, trophies, medals, ceremonial events and photo opportunities. These have their own power as they are capable of visibly demonstrate the importance that the occasion and the organisation behind the event. However, the message is not one of feedback or affirmation. They are lost when the organisation asserts itself into the forefront and talk about itself at the expense of the awardees. This is when the true purpose of celebration is lost. This is where the awardees become aware that they are just mere instruments to enable the company to showcase the quality of its organisation.
When we see through the instrumentation in the celebration, it also spells the end of real celebration. It no longer holds the sacred purpose and meaning of feedback and affirmation, and therefore lost its effectiveness for creating inspirations and aspirations in the awardees. This means when we celebrate without thinking about the organisation and without all those instrumentation, we are then really and truly celebrating success in an authentic way.
Understanding Ourselves
Sun Tzu had said that to win any battle, we need to understand ourselves and our opponents. If we only know one and not the other, our chance of winning is fifty percentage. This chance is further reduced to zero when we do not know either.
There are many ways to know ourselves and one such ways is to understand the ways we interact with our colleagues. When we first join our organisation, we make a few observations about our surrounding and the people in it. Generally, we make two kinds of assessment - we evaluate the environment to determine it favourability and we assess for the amount of control we have over others.
By putting these two together, we can produce a two-by-two matrix, which informs us on the kinds of behaviour we should adopt at work to interact with others. This matrix provides us with four behavioural modes. These are found in the diagram below:
In dominance, we have the advantage of a favourable environment and control to dictate what could be accompanied. When our environment is positive and enabling but we lack of control over the things we want complete, we will have to change and adopt a more influencing and persuasive stance.
We become more stead fasten when we are constraint by having no control over what has to be done and the environment is not altogether supportive. In such a circumstance, being calm and steady may be the strategy to survive the situation. Finally, if the environment is negative but we have a say over what should be done, we could take on a more conscientious and calm approach in dealing with the interactions we have with our peers.
We must accept that we cannot change others but ourselves. If we are aware of ourselves and could change our behaviours with dexterity, we could increase our propensity of accomplishing our goals.
Leverage on the Diversity Around Us
New knowledge is created when existing information and knowledge is combined and recombined with other existing information and knowledge. However, because this information and knowledge resides in individuals and not within the systems, these combination and recombination activities will only happened when the people share with each other.
When we talk about diversity, we want to make use of the information and knowledge arising from many differing backgrounds, exposures and experiences as the source for generating new knowledge. This could only be afforded when there is diversity in the group and people in the group share honestly.
We rarely share honestly and usually there is not enough of diversity in the group to carry enough of information and knowledge to make the sharing and combining powerful enough. Therefore, it is not natural that the group would always have the mix of people we desired and they would share without reservation.
These have to be created by design and cultivated with time. We need skills to do these and there are six of these. These are communication, active listening, relationship building within the group and with other stakeholders, problem solving and counselling.
When we acquired these skills, we could build enough of trust with each other to share authentically and fully tap into the wisdom diversity has for the group.
Being Heedfully Considerate
When we say we will consider something, it means that we will make an effort to look at both the pros and cons of that thing and weigh them for their implications before deciding on the next course of action. This act is call considering and the evaluations produce a list of considerations. An informed decision is one made by choosing an decision option that produces the best outcomes but impact the stakeholders the least after examining these considerations.
When we are heedful to others, we make a promise to ourselves to take care of the feelings and emotions of others for each act that we are about to make. In doing so, we think not just about choosing, deciding and executing our action, we also look at whether our action will cause harm to others as well.
Therefore, heedful consideration could be seen as a game where each of us is constantly and consistently is mindful about the consequences of our actions on others, and diligently making calculations of the tradeoffs between outcomes and their impact.
If the cons is greater than the pros, the current decision choice is not workable. If the negative impact is greater than the positive outcome, this decision option may need tweaking. If the impact could not be significantly negated by other acts, another decision option must be made available.
The fundamental rule is not to carry out any course of action that we are unsure of its consequences and impact. There is always a better option in existence. We have to look for them. This is being heedfully considerate and the seed for harmonious relationships.
Continuously Acknowledge, Accept, and Inspire Ourselves
Language could present itself in many forms. Words, symbols and gestures could by themselves or in combination use as expressions of the language and we use these to express our world.
We use language to describe and perceive the world. We use language to appreciate and evaluate our environment. We also use language to interact with our surrounding. Our thoughts are created in language. This is the importance of language.
This is also the bane of language. If our thoughts are made up of negative language, our world, our choices and our behaviours become negative. This means who we are to ourselves and to others is determined by the language we use in our thoughts when we think about ourselves and of others. This calls for us to be fully aware of our thoughts and the quality of the language used in these thoughts.
No human is perfect and therefore we are fallible. We need to acknowledge and accept this true identity rather than to mask it or run away from it. However, not all of us are capable of forgiving ourselves for the errors and failures we had committed, and we beat ourselves up with the language we use on ourselves. We could call these guilt and self-blame but these are in a language we understand and we never hesitate to use it to beat ourselves up when we are unable to maintain our facade of perfection.
Life should not have to be like this. Like you, I am not unique. Like you, I fall too. Just like all creatures in the world, I have my own weaknesses and could fall. Like you, I may be able to 'cover' my tracks but there is no embarrassment and shame for not doing so and be honest about it.
By accepting ourselves for who we are, we are capable of forgiving ourselves and continuing to be inspired by the true intent we want with our lives. We are not obstructed by the ghosts of our past because we know that we are never better than anyone else. So, where is the fear when all human are equal? This awareness makes us unstoppable from being great.
When we could look beyond this need to constantly look good to ourselves and in front of others, we unlock ourselves from our constraints so that we are able to attain a higher realm of experiences and self-awareness, and these are the recipes of self-efficacy and self-fulfilment.
Honour Our Word
In our life, one way or another and no matter how hard we had tried, we will break some of the promises that we had made. These could be promises we had made to ourselves or to others.
The pain is not in breaking these promises. Breaking our promises is easy. We just do not carry out the promised act. The source of the pain is really from the guilt of knowing someone is going to be disappointed and knowing how untrue the excuses we had used to explain away these lapses.
Humans are incredible creatures. We like to avoid pain and in these instances, we deal with it by pretending that the promises never ever existed or we took the escapist route by avoiding the person we had given our promises to. Over time we forget, even for those promises we made to ourselves.
However, we do not have to live like this. We can get out of this vicious cycle of guilt and flight instinct by recognising that there is a difference between keeping to our promise and honouring our word.
In keeping to our promise, we are prone to lapses and the feeling of guilt arising from our inability to forgive ourselves. In honouring our word, we acknowledge our occasional failures of not able to deliver our promises. We are capable of articulating authentically the lapses and sought forgiveness from those we had promised.
We can restart life again because we know it is useless to bash ourselves with our guilt or run away from the people we had made promises. We know we are committed to stay on course and recognise that lapses are just transient occurrences that are part and parcel of staying committed. People who honour their words do not dwell on meaningless self-criticisms but keep looking forward and moving ahead to find opportunities to realise the word.
People who practises honouring his word stays honest to himself and remains powerful throughout his life.
This article was 1st written on 19 May 2009.
Copyright 2009. Anthony Mok. All Rights Reserved.
