Guiding your team

June 01, 2018 by Banchiwosen Woldeyesus

I am not progressing much,

Doing everything alone.

Swinging at the same spot,

Like a pendulum.

Till it hurts too much to try.

No one knows why,

But,

Much is accomplished,

When everyone,

Fly together,

And work together.

Towards a certain point.

This is what I am,

This is what I should be.

_Letter to the Leader

A leader is not only the head of a company, a general, an employer or a head of a school. Leaders are found in the above places and also in unlikely places. They are found in marriages, females, males, elderly people, youth and even children. This shows that leaders are found in all places and in every human being that we can think of.

Leading oneself

A person can lead himself when he knows himself well, when he knows what his talents are and what he wants to accomplish specifically through his team. And more importantly once he knows what his goals are, what kinds of methods the leader uses to get the maximum out of his team to get to his goal.

                        “What I need is someone who will make me do what I can.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

Leading others

Once a person leads himself, he can be an example to others through his actions.

Here is a leadership exercise for you:

Assume you are an expert on making an airplane made by a single A4 size paper (you know, one of those things that kids love to make as a play thing). Mind you this is an exercise on leadership. You know the step by step process of creating a paper airplane and you as a leader have a job of teaching and passing on this knowledge to your team. For the sake of the exercise, you have 10 people under you. You have a deadline for this job. Now, what is the best way of passing all your knowledge to all your people within a deadline?

Before you go to the next paragraph, take a moment here. Think on your answer.

Again think more, is that the best you can do with the allowed time?

If your answer is “I will teach my 10 people all the steps taken to make an airplane on paper individually” then you are not using your people effectively. What if you have 100 people under you? Or more? What will you do then? Can you teach your 100 people all the necessary steps? Can reach all of them effectively? Do you have the time? Even if you do, is that the best use of your time and your people?

This example was taught in one training session where I was part of by an Indian trainer. I got lots of lessons that day. Here is one lesson the instructor told the class that day on this particular example.

“Whether you have 10 or 100 people under you, first find out each person’s talent. Everyone is different. Each of us are unique in our own way. We all have our own strengths and weaknesses. It is the job (the main job) of the leader to find out these strengths and weaknesses of every individual in his team. Once he finds individual talents, he can assign tasks accordingly. To understand this clearly, let us take the example of airplane made by paper. Of course this is a metaphor. Once you understand the concept you can apply it in real life situations. To simplify the exercise, assume there are 5 necessary steps in making this plane that flies. The ultimate goal of the leader in this scenario is to make his team make 20 paper planes that all can fly (within a specific allowed time)

• Step 1(e.g. fold the paper equally)
• Step 2
• Step 3
• Step 4
• Step 5 (final step)

All these steps are necessary to make one paper plane without missing any single step. Now to make the 20 planes within a short time with the people that we have, we must divide the tasks (for example give step 1 to 4 of your people and they do that task only). These chosen 4 people must be very good in the accomplishment of step 1 task to the best of their abilities. By nature when a person does something again and again, he makes progress on his assigned task from time to time and then he becomes very good at it. In fact he will become an expert on it. That is why it is said repetition is a convincing argument.

Then we, all can conquer. You have heard of the saying divide and conquer. It has merit in it. Through this mechanism the next group takes what step1 has done and do their job (i.e. step 2) and this method continues to the last step. By the way all these steps are done simultaneously, so everyone is contributing their share to the ultimate goal. This is the best way of passing what you know to your team with the least amount of time and effective use of everyone’s talent. And underneath all, the leader will have created specialized people (a certain group of people who specialize in one area and another group who are experts in another area and so on.)”

                                                                                    “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has.” Margaret Mead