Leading People: A Sensemaker’s View
January 4th, 2011Author: Chris Dennis
I am not nor will I be an inanimate piece of “human capital”. Nor am I a resource (favoured by project management) and neither am I an asset to be leveraged. I am, however, very cynical at the intentions of management (and I have been the CEO of a reasonable size organisation) and how the ‘management’ manipulate people to achieve the results – read Milton Friedman – which are profits.
I am a person with a head and heart which has accumulated many skills and developed those skills into competencies by trying out and applying those skills. Some worked and others didn’t. I learned from those that didn’t as I had to come up with a recovery plan that needed me to be humble, identify the weakness in my thinking, the gaps in my skills or the poor application techniques.
What you get when you work with me is a person who is prepared to deliver competencies for an amount of money. You get the head and the thinking to get the job done. But, if you want the job done in the context of a team, you have to involve me with my heart so that I can interact with others at an emotional level to really deliver more than the sum of the parts.
As you engage my heart and I trust you enough to remove the mask and show the emotional me and I am no longer an ‘asset’ or any other inanimate object. I am a person with feelings, drive, enthusiasm and a person with some measure of total intelligence. Without me and the other persons making up the team, you have nothing as a manager. You can hold the status quo, perhaps.
To get ahead, you had better go sufficiently out of your way to get to know what wakes me up in the morning and brings creativity and initiative into the work place along with head and the competencies.
Until you have my heart, you have nothing creative, nothing that will move you forward or nothing that will help you grow. My value is the value you ascribe to the work you ask me to do. What you want is the multiplier effect of adding the heart and creativity in thinking and working with team mates: this gets you far more than your ascribed value. And, this is not an asset. What you are asking for is the guts of your growth – of your sustainable success and the success of the rest of the people in the organisation.
Valued as an asset, you get no value. Then I am just another ‘piece’ to move about in the grandeur of your plan.
Valued as a person, you get natural drive and creative approaches to difficulties. I am one of the pieces that move and move others. This group is a team of people who take you farther than you can imagine. We are people – individuals with skills and competencies who, for the context that wakes us up and urges us to contribute imagination and testing probes, will give you value far greater than expect.
How do you see yourselves as individuals and an integral part of a team?