Creative Leadership Coaching

My colleagues seated in the rows behind us seemed to be much slower on the uptake than I had given them credit for. Could it be that we leaders in the front row were, in fact, smarter?

To begin at the beginning, my colleagues and I were attending a workshop that I had organized for a high technology company in Northern California. Early in the training, the facilitator organized a training game. She divided us into three teams (or mini-organizations) of about 9 people each. To simulate the communication dynamics of most organizations, each group was seated in three rows, with more senior leaders in the front and less senior participants in the back.

The task would be given to each team in writing. Whichever team completed the task first would win. The rules of the game were:

1. All communication needed to be in writing.
2. Each row acted as a team, and had to agree on what to write.
3. Each row could only initiate communications with the row behind it (senior to less senior)
4. The less senior row could only respond to the specific instruction or question.
5. All communications needed to be written on the same sheet of paper; that is, each row had to receive a response before it initiated the next communication.

We each received a piece of paper with our instructions. We in the front row compared our notes. The paper said that the task was for everyone to pass the paper with their instructions on it forward. The communication setup was a little awkward but the task was stone-simple. We were confident we’d have it done in less than a minute!

We “leaders” scribbled our request on a piece of paper and passed it back: “Ok – let’s just do it!”

Instead of receiving the flood of papers forward as we expected, there was a long silence, and then some writing, then more silence. What is taking them so long? we wondered. It was a little frustrating to misfire on such a simple task.

Finally, we received our paper back, with question marks on it! The other two rows apparently didn’t understand the instructions. OK, how could we make it any plainer…. We wrote: “Just go ahead and pass them forward now.”

The result was, unfortunately, the same. We “front-rowers” were frustrated, baffled and a bit disgusted that our colleagues lacked our clarity and competitive spirit. Yet, in being critical of our colleagues, I notice that there is something of a sense of self-affirmation…

Ours was not the only group to struggle with this exercise, which was both discouraging and reassuring…

After several minutes of watching us flail, the trainer changed the rules and allowed us to all communicate directly. What we soon discovered was that only the people in the front row had been given the objective; the other two rows were simply instructed to do what the row in front of them told them to do.

At that moment, I understood that we in the first row were, in fact, the ones who had been incompetent in that situation. Have you ever made the mistake of driving the wrong way down a one way street? Others appeared wrong to us, because we ourselves were in the wrong. And, we were entrenched in our error, because we all saw the world the same way — differently than the rest of our “organization” saw it — and the “rules” made it very difficult to get the feedback we needed. As a result, our organizations executed poorly and we were convinced that the problem lay outside ourselves.

What a great learning experience, on many levels! Here are some insights I personally took away from that experience:

1. As leaders, we need to be careful to ensure that we have clearly communicated the world as we see it, including facts, the models that guide our thinking, and our objectives. It’s folly to assume that we are all on the same page.
2. When upward feedback loops are limited, we can easily become disconnected from the realities faced by organizational members.
3. This limitation can also shield us from knowledge of our real strengths and failings.
4. When organizational performance is subpar or when organizational members are performing poorly, the first place to look to solve the problem must be at ourselves. What are we doing (or not doing) that is creating this result?