Page 112 - Make Work Great

Growing Your Crystal

at hand, learned what he could, and agreed to try his best. I strongly
believe, by the way, that he did try his best. I saw no evidence to suggest
that he purposely caused any of the diffi culty that ensued on his team.
Yet he did cause it—right from the start. By interviewing the other
team members and refl ecting on what I observed, I learned what had
happened. It began with the leader in the fi rst 20 minutes of the ses-
sion. The fi rst time I asked the teams to meet independently and begin
planning, he laid the foundation for his team’s downfall.
How? His high level of distraction came through in everything he
did. In subtle ways, he communicated to his second-tier managers that
“whatever you do is fi ne; it doesn’t really matter.” At that moment, when
he was supposed to be explaining to his group what they had to do, he
instead essentially told them, “Figure it out if you want to—or not.” This
leader unwittingly positioned himself as the exact opposite of Emma (my
supervisor from Chapter 1); he was distracted, disengaged, and disinter-
ested. And his team heard his message loud and clear. “Figure it out if
you want to—or not” became their operational philosophy for the day.
The detriment of this cultural pattern was widespread. In one of many
examples, an individual tasked with overseeing quality of production
highlighted some mistakes in plenty of time to correct them. The people
doing the work were overwrought with confl ict among themselves and
basically told the quality control person to keep quiet. She responded
with, “Fine, you’ll see,” and walked away. The leader watched indif-
ferently, and the other team members saw his indifference.
With perfect hindsight, I can think of a few interventions that might
have saved the situation. Certainly, fi nding a different leader would have
helped. But a new start—either at the outset of the activity or anywhere
along the way—could also have worked with the same leader. Firing
isn’t always the answer. What if the leader had stopped everything,
owned up to his role in the problems at hand, and asked everyone to
regroup with the notion of fi nding answers to their most pressing ques-
tions? Had the leader changed what he was role-modeling at any point
in the process, I believe the results would have been quite different.
Actually, any team member could have done the same thing. In my
haste to help the leader “on the fl y,” I failed to encourage the rest of

100