Page 191 - Make Work Great

Leading Your Crystal

of behavior at all times. As the demonstrator of new patterns, you’re
always on stage, and never is that more true than in a group setting.
There, the actions you take and the patterns of behavior you use are
on display for everyone to see. If you’re actually leading the group,
your role presents an even greater opportunity—and even greater
risk—because you’re involving everyone in your personal solution to
the optimization question of the critical ratio of output versus stress.
When you get it right and demonstrate how your cultural patterns
produce positive outcomes with minimal stress, you further both your
work objectives and your culture-building objectives. When you get
it wrong and create confusion, stress, or agitation, you harm your
credibility, your output, and the growth of your cultural crystal.

This means you must begin to interact with and influence groups of
people working together. Being a one-on-one advisor is not enough;
you must learn to make groups great too.

Why People Gather
At this point in the book, you shouldn’t be surprised that you begin,
yet again, with purpose. In the context of group work, this means
that you must start by asking for overtness about the purpose of the
group’s coming together. Luckily, this is a particularly easy place to
start, because at the highest level, all group work can be defi ned by
one or both of two basic purposes: to inform or to solve.
When people come together for the dissemination of new informa-
tion, the reinforcement of existing facts or policies, or the one-way
transmission of assignments, the purpose is to inform. Quarterly earn-
ings summaries, policy change announcement meetings, and action
huddles in which work orders are handed out are ostensibly held for
this purpose. Such meetings use a one-way transmission of factual
information, as shown on the left side of Figure 8.2. It’s important
to realize, however, that the type of information being transferred
need not be the overt, factual sort of data we visualize when we think
about policy updates or marching orders. Groups exchange a second
type of information that is equally important but much harder to rec-

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