Managing Leadership^®

Let’s imagine that you inform several of your staff members that they have been assigned to a new project, and you ask them to report to the project room the next morning. After they are all there, someone walks in, provides a contextual statement about the larger endeavor the project is a part of, writes the project goal and a due date on the whiteboard, and then leaves.

What do you suppose would happen?

Would they all sit there like lumps, defiantly refusing to budge without specific instructions?

Would they regard the goal written on the whiteboard for a while, consider the larger initiative and the project’s role in it, and begin to discuss the implications these have for how to structure the project and get it moving?

Would they, perhaps, call in certain seniors and peers for elaboration, so that they could generate a stronger feel for what was needed, and to begin to develop a collaborative support network deeper in the broader organization for their work?

Do you think you could guess which of the people you assigned to the project would play what role in getting things moving? Do you suppose you could assign a value to those different roles that accurately reflects their varying influence in the dynamics that begin to stir in the room?

Would any such activity begin to gel, generating project-specific group structure, disciplined activity, and forward motion to goal completion? Or would the sails fail to fill, leaving the initially promising interest, discussions, and even nascent organization becalmed in the absence of external direction?

There are three general responses here: 1), refusal to move without specific orders, 2) group cohesion around the goal leading to structure, action, and project completion, and 3) nascent interest and even planning which fades in the absence of outside direction.

Which do you think would happen with the staff available to you for such an experiment? What does your answer say about the power and role of goals in your organization?

Tomorrow, we’re going to talk a bit about what these questions – and your answers – mean in our larger conversation about organizational leadership. Please do join in.

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Today’s tip: Speaking of misperceptions about what we see, or anticipate, flowing from our own imagined influence within, or understanding of, our organizations, please see this fascinating piece from Yahoo! News about what lies behind many disorienting optical tricks.

It seems that there is a delay between visual information striking your eyes and its being transmitted to and interpreted by your brain. That delay is miniscule, but sufficient to cause problems when, saying trying to catch a ball speeding toward you.

The brain responds by predicting the trajectory of events over the period of the delay, and basically telling you that that prediction has already occurred, so that you can respond in real time. Please see the article for details about this, and the interesting way it can sometimes cause optical illusions that we’ve all experienced.

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