What I want to do is point out some of the behaviors, some of the leadership
behaviors that were want to point out some the leadership behaviors that the
leader offered or engaged in that allowed the team to get through this thing.
And so, I want to talk as much about what they did as about how these, sort of,
categories of leadership actions that could take place.
And so, one problem we have often in teams is that the teams will
disintegrate. Now, we talked a little bit in, in the
groups level about meaning and how groups have to have a meaning and they have to
have sense. They have to know what they are doing and
why they are doing it. Well, if you start reading the failure,
quadruple failure, it's a problem they never faced before, all of the sudden,
all the people working on the problem, they went into their little holes.
And they just they're only talking to people on their teams.
And so the leader here realized that the team was disintegrating that, in fact,
the sense that they were all part of something, a part of a project going
forward together, but they needed to be together.
They need each other, was getting lost. And so we pull people together and said,
hey, come on back, come back here. By doing that he articulated the norms,
and said okay, this is how we're going to be.
This is what we're going to to do, we're not going to guess, we're not going to
all talk at the same time, but I need your attention here.
And so we pull everyone together and said, this is how we're going to be.
And this is what we're going to do. We also showed careful listening and so
one point, one of the the. At one point of the engineers came and
said hey they're running out of oxygen and we've got this problem.
He said, well aren't there scrubbers on board.
He said, well these are square here and these are round here and they don't fit
together there. And so, this kind of careful listening is
an important thing, that someone comes up and says, hey, wait, we have a problem.
Even though the leader was focused on a different problem, he had to actually
listen to that. And then, he saidwWell, I don't have the
bandwidth to do everything and so, I'm just going to delegate authority.
I'm going to say well, look, it's like, you have to do this, you have to fit a
square peg in a round hole or, and you have to do it rapidly.
So, take off and do that. And it's going to, delegation of
authority is often hard. Because here's a life or death situation,
it requires innovation, and we have to trust people to go off and do the thing
that we need them to do. Taking responsibility, and so the person
who's given the delegated task, takes responsibility for it.
Says, hey look team, the people upstairs have given us this.
we really have to come through. This is a life death, death situation.
an so this kind of taking of responsibility is an important part of
this as well. So, he was able to give the
responsibility and the responsibility was also taken.
The sub leader of the, of the smaller team was able to say, hey look this is
the problem. And, and Greg came very clear with
problem definition. And actually he had some props along.
He said we're going to fit this into a hole made for this using nothing but
this. And so they started to put on coffee,
they started to express the norms that they're going to use to solve this
problem together. At the same time, other teams are going
and so they're doing the thing called multiplying effort.
And so there are multiple parallel streams going.
And when we talked about time constraints, this is a way to do,
basically, get past those time constraints.
And so here, they're multiplying the effort of the individual by having
individuals work on the different aspects of the problem at the same time in
paralell. He's able to stay fit with the landscape.
And so in this case, he suspects that people are still working according to the
old plan or that they have some kind of idea that they're going to stick with the
old plan. Or that they keep referring back to the
old plan as a way to think of going forward.
I think from an innovation perspective that's not going to work.
You don't want people going back to the old way.
You want people moving forward to a new way.
And so he does this very, sort of literal thing of taking the plan and throwing it
in the trash, and says, you know, this is not what we're doing.
we're going to get our people home, that's the new goal.
And he's very clear about that, about how it is that they need to stay fit with the
landscape. Something has changed in the environment,
and so they need to change their approach to what's going on.
And he has to make it clear to them that we have a new goal at hand.