Danielle V. Minson — Raising the Bar
Fundamental #19 — Lead By Example
For the better part of two years, our Federation team has been making a deliberate effort to define what drives our work and how we do it. The four core values of Community, Inclusivity, Learning, and Integrity rose to the top. The next step was to identify a list of fundamentals: actionable, daily core behaviors that bring our core values to life and define our culture. Each week, we make a point to focus on practicing a different fundamental, and I kick off that effort by sharing my thoughts on each one at the beginning of each week. Here are my thoughts for our nineteenth week:
LEAD BY EXAMPLE— The best way to influence others is through your own example. Take responsibility, both formally and informally to coach, guide, teach and mentor.
I learned a lot during the group exercise games during our staff retreat—especially from the exercises in the forest (e.g. the 2 Plank-Island exercise, the “whale watch” and the hula hoop). In those groups no one had job titles or seniority and the groups were mixed so that few had worked together before. If I had bet on which members of my group would play leadership roles through these challenges, I would have guessed wrong.
Other people had better ideas than I did for most of these challenges. So my best contribution was not to lead in those instances but to follow and support those who had good ideas and the energy and confidence to help us solve the problem at hand.
Our group got the best results when we were flexible enough to rotate who was leading, listening to whoever had strengths that matched that particular challenge. Also, sometimes we would try the approach suggested by one member and if it didn’t fully solve the problem we turned to someone who saw a different approach.
I learned that back here in the office, we should expect to be surprised about who has particular strengths, interests and insights that match a new problem or task. We should be flexible and switch things up to enable people to try out different roles. Trying out different roles is also possible when we find creative ways to “informally” coach and mentor each other. These approaches will not only help us create better outcomes, it will make working together more interesting and help us get to know and value each other better.
See here for Shep’s comments on all the fundamentals so far.
