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My boss had been reading John Ortberg’s ‘Everybody’s Normal Till You Get to Know Them’ and it was time for us to plan our annual leadership team retreat. Looking for a theme title, he suggested half-jokingly, ‘How about ‘Everybody’s Weird’?’ I laughed at first but then thought for a moment…what a great concept and idea. It felt inspired. How to blow away any sense of normality and conformity and to meet each other afresh as we really are. Our creativity lies in our unique weirdness and what a great way to explore our individual quirkyness and its potential for the team and organisation.
Every group, every team, develops its own normative behaviours. Some even prescribe them by developing explicit competency and behavioural frameworks. It provides a sense of identity, stability and predictability. It can also improve focus and how people work together by establishing a set of ground rules, how we can be at our best. The flip side of all of this is that a team can begin to feel too homogeneous, too bland. It can lose its creative spark, its innovative spirit. The challenge was how to rediscover our differences, our wonderful, exciting, diversity in all its weird complexity. We invited people to bring objects that represented something significant in their personal lives and to share their stories. We invited people to use psychometrics to explore their preferences to shared them in the group. We invited them to challenge the psychometric frames, not to allow themselves to be too categorised. We invited people to challenge stereotypes, to break the moulds they felt squeezed or squeezed themselves into, to look intently for what they didn’t normally notice in themselves and each other, to allow themselves to be surprised and inspired by what they discovered. It felt like an energetic release. People laughed more, some cried more, others prayed deeply together. The burden of leadership felt lighter as people connected and bonded in a new way. It felt easier to challenge and to encourage. By relaxing into each other and themselves, people became more vibrant, more colourful, less stressed. They saw fresh possibilities that lay hidden from sight before. They discovered more things they liked about each other, fresh points of common passion, interest and concern. They built new friendships that eased their ways of working. It felt more like team. What space do you and your organisation allow for weirdness? Do you actively seek, nurture and reward differences? Do your leadership style and culture bring out and celebrate individuals’ strange idiosyncracies, each person’s unique God-given gifts, talents and potential? Have you had experiences where a capacity for weirdness has enhanced your team or organisation’s creativity and innovation? Do you risk inadvertently squeezing out the best of weirdness by policies and practices that drive towards uniformity? Could a bit more weirdness be more inspiring and effective – and fun?! :)
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Do you ever find yourself talking at cross purposes with a client, resulting in bemusement, confusion or frustration? I met with a team recently to explore their work with others. I noticed how they would sometimes describe themselves as a ‘service function’, a title that implied and created a specific type of role and relationship in their own minds as well as in the minds of others.
As we explored the nature of their work in more depth, it became clear that they aspired to relate to clients as business partners, not simply as service providers. In fact, they already relate to clients in a number of different modes but they hadn’t yet stopped to reflect on and articulate this clearly. As they moved between modes implicitly rather than explicitly, it risked confusion. We separated the modes into a conceptual map, drawing this on a flipchart with ‘quality and accountability’ as an overall goal. Sometimes they operated as consultants, helping others to think through, understand and do things well for themselves. Sometimes they operated as co-leaders, running joint initiatives, events, projects or processes in collaboration with others. Sometimes they operated as service providers, providing information, advice or services or doing specific tasks on behalf of others. Sometimes they operated in governance mode, ensuring that clients are aware of and adhere to legal, policy and agreed good practice. The trick as a business partner is to navigate between modes according contextual opportunities and demands. It’s one thing to feel clear about your own role and chosen mode in a particular situation yet important, too, to ensure the client is also clear. One way to do this is to pose a simple question: ‘This is how I see my role and your role in this situation. Is that how you see it?’ Posing the question in this way opens the possibility for discussion, clarification and negotiation. |
AuthorNick is a psychological coach, OD consultant and trainer, specialising in critical reflective practice.
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