Page 221 - Make Work Great

Leading Your Crystal

out their scripts until the plot lags, then the author switches their
roles around to keep things interesting. 2
You can probably replace this fairy tale with any number of stories
from your own workplace. Perhaps a problem arises with a delivery
schedule that’s been promised to a customer. The project leader, play-
ing rescuer to the customer, promises to save the day. He does so by
forcing overtime commitments on the project team, thus becoming
the persecutor of the team (his victims). Or an unscrupulous manager
dishonestly shifts the blame for a software glitch to an uninvolved
programmer who has made other mistakes in the past that cost other
members of her group time and frustration. She plays persecutor to
the programmer’s victim because she wants to use the mistake as an
excuse to fi re the unpopular programmer, thereby playing rescuer to
the rest of her team.
The possibilities are endless, and the scripts both compelling and
commonplace. Yet this triumvirate—rescuer, persecutor, and vic-
tim—is the inventory of roles that you must avoid at all costs in your
efforts to become a culture builder. The extent to which you fall
short, taking on the predefi ned roles and acting out the associated
scripts, is the extent to which you fail to demonstrate anything new
to the people around you. When you’re in a pre-scripted role, you’re
encouraging others to take on related roles and discouraging them
from spending their energy on the exchange of real information.
In the crystalline network, you can be a contributor of intelligence
or a blind follower of preordained roles, but you can’t be both.

Don’t Be a Rescuer
If you follow the advice in this book, you’re likely to get some posi-
tive results, possibly in fairly short order. When you do, and others
begin to look to you for guidance, some of them will unwittingly cast
you in the role of rescuer: “Kate saved us. Kate fi gured it out when
nobody else could. Kate did the work of two people in half the time.
Kate is an asset to all of us.” It would seem on the surface that it’s
very good to be Kate.

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