Page 202 - The extraordinary leader

New Insights into Leadership Development • 179

and asked questions about their projects. If one of them needed a hand or
faced schedule pressures, she volunteered to help. And even though Lai was
new to the workplace culture, her colleagues appreciated her willingness to
help them out, especially given that their problems were not hers.
Kelley continues describing Lai’s actions:

● She found a colleague who could not get a software program to work,
and Lai recalled a new programming tool she had picked up in an
advanced course in college and offered that solution to the colleague.
She offered to work on the software problem while the colleague
finished the larger project.
● When new software tools needed to be installed on everyone’s
computers, the assumption was that everyone would use the
traditional approach of installing it themselves, largely by trial and
error. Lai had installed the software during her internship and thought
it made more sense for one person to move up the learning curve and
do it for everyone. She volunteered. It ended up taking two weeks,
instead of the four days she had estimated, but she stuck it out and
completed all of the installations.
● A colleague who had been scheduled for an all-night lab testing
session was suddenly called away to a funeral for a family member.
When the manager convened a meeting to see how this absence
could be covered, there was much looking at the floor and “covering
your face” behavior. As the supervisor was about to make an arbitrary
assignment to some unwilling person, Lai volunteered. She later
recalls, “I figured that it was most important to get accepted into the
team, and what better way than to help them out.”

Lai was on her way to becoming a “star” in the Bell Labs vernacular. It had
little to do with being technically competent but everything to do with taking
initiative. Kelley writes, “Average performers—who constitute 60 to 80 per-
cent of the workforce—don’t get it. That group is most likely to view initia-
tive taking as activity for activity’s sake, getting stuck doing someone else’s
work, or taking on work that is not part of their job description. Cynical
average performers see it as kissing up to the boss or colleagues.”
It might surprise readers to know that Henry, the loner Bell Labs
hire, believed he was taking initiative. “I gathered up the latest technical