When I first viewed the questions that were attached to this exercise I was thinking there is no way that MBA students could be outdone by kindergarteners. But once I listened to the reasoning and the data of the experiment I quickly had the idea that this makes perfect sense. The MBA students were jockeying for the role of leader. The alpha is a title that people with type A personalities achieve to obtain. The type A personality seems to have a hard time sharing in the leadership role with others freely and they tend to come up with great ideas but when that idea is challenged they can become agitated that their idea is challenged.
I feel that kids have not learned the bad habits that adults have in trying to outshine each other. Kids like to have friends and peers that want to play together. The idea of being isolated from friends does not normally go over very well with the kids. The team model of children is not a hope but often is a reality. Kids strive to work together to accomplish a common task. The idea of problem solving and making the ideas work is very exciting to the kids.
In the idea where CEO’s with executive assistants perform better than CEO’s alone is the executive assistants are the doers. These assistants often are the ones that make the company work and the CEO’s just provide direction. I have always understood that the workers of the company are the ones that make or break the company on the basis that a CEO can say this is what we need to get the mission of the company accomplished but it is the workers, executive assistants that actually get the job done. When you have a lot of chief’s and no Indians the problem of job completion or task completion will come up. The CEO’s will look for others to get the work don and when they have to do the work themselves they may have a problem is actually agreeing on how to start.
I would love to break the groups up and have them problem solve the issue given to them. I would then repeat the same exercise with different team members. I would then present a new task and start in reverse order where I have the stranger groups work together and then back to their original groups and complete the task. I would than sit down with the group as a whole and allow them to see the results of each exercise.
The idea of working together as a team and not jockeying on the idea on who is going lead the team. I have come to realize that working together for the common goal of the mission is a very important concept and I will apply this to my career. Coming from a para military career I think that if the command structure was downsized the efficiency of the agency as a whole would be greatly improved and the mission statement would be closer to being fulfilled.
No comments:
Post a Comment