Chickens and competition
How do counting eggs and studying chickens' productivity lead to global recommendations about leadership and business organization? A very good question indeed; Margaret Heffernan has the answer. It is quite rare I propose twice the same speaker in a post but, showing how individual competition rolled out by the selected super chickens lets Margaret Heffernan illustrate how internal safety is necessary for an organization to thrive (Simon Sinek Inc.). Competitive super chickens are not inspiring role models. According to the author: “the past 50 years, we've run most organizations and some societies along with the super chicken model. We've thought that success is achieved by picking the superstars, the brightest men, or occasionally women, in the room, and giving them all the resources and all the power. And the result has been just the same as in William Muir's experiment: aggression, dysfunction, and waste” The next step is to use an MIT’s experiment to demonstrate that successful groups have three characteristics in common: high level of social sensitivity, equal time to each other (no free passenger or dominant voice) and more women. The striking thing about this MIT experiment is that what's common to successful groups is their social connectedness to each other. Then Margaret Heffernan proposes some examples to make our company's social capital grow. She defines social capital as the reliance and interdependence that builds trust. I encourage you to watch the whole speech, but I give you my preferred quote: “Now, we need to let people motivate each other. And for years, we've thought that leaders were heroic soloists who were expected, all by themselves, to solve complex problems. Now, we need to redefine leadership as an activity in which conditions are created in which everyone can do their most courageous thinking together.” So now the question for us is what kind of culture and environment do we create to make our organization thrive? As leaders and HR what habits do we propose to develop support, trust, openness, creative conflicts (and not toxic ones), and meeting opportunities? I have a few ideas, and you, what do you propose?
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#leadership #success #organisationalculture #agileworking #trust #coachingandmentoring