Page 19 - Make Work Great

Make Work Great

• Those people did not have a crystal ball. When they created
their assumptions, they had no way of knowing what you would
face now. Besides, there’s a good chance they never intended
their assumptions to drive your behavior anyway.

Yet despite all this, the powerful majority—the crowd of peers,
authority fi gures, and role set members around you—is constantly
teaching, modeling, and exhibiting this set of assumptions to each
other, to you, and to any new person who joins your ranks. And to
the extent that you are a peer, an authority fi gure, a customer, or
any other member of someone else’s role set, you’re teaching and
modeling them too. Like it or not, through your actions, you are a
teacher.
In that role lies your power to create and change the culture around
you. The fi nal decision as to what ideas you discuss and what actions
you take is still in your hands, and it strongly affects your world.
After all, some of the behavior of the people around you—behavior
that you’re inclined to ascribe incorrectly to their personal choice
instead of their situation—may well have been learned by watching
you!
You can choose to repeat the established precedent, or you can
choose to role-model something different. In fact, choosing to differ
from the group can be benefi cial even if the specifi c choice you make
is wrong. In Asch’s perceptual problem-solving experiments, when
one of the scripted actors gave a response inconsistent with those of
the other actors, the real subject was more likely to depart from the
perceived “majority” and give the correct answer. The accuracy of
the subjects was highest in cases where the dissenting actor voiced
an opinion that was further from the correct answer than the rest
of the scripted majority. Just suggest something different, no mat-
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ter how far-fetched it seems to others, and the rest may take care of
itself. Your departure from the norm demonstrates that precedent can
indeed be changed; your demonstration inspires others to fi nd their
own voices too.

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