Defying the Crowd by Robert J. Sternberg & Todd I. Lubart

Author:Robert J. Sternberg & Todd I. Lubart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Free Press
Published: 1995-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Informal Knowledge

Consider a leadership problem faced by one of the authors recently. As acting chair of the Department of Psychology at Yale, he decided that one of his major goals would be to try to increase the team spirit of the members of the department. Although the people in the department worked well as individuals, they did not display the kind of cohesiveness and sense of shared mission that he believed would make them maximally effective as a group.

He tried to come up with a creative idea to instill a sense of team spirit in the department. His first effort in this direction was to organize a group picnic at a beach in a community about fifteen miles from New Haven. Everyone in the department was invited to come to the picnic. The picnic seemed to be a good way of getting people together and starting toward a new spirit of cooperation and team play. There was just one problem: Few people came to the picnic; almost none of the faculty showed up.

The author’s first reaction was one of frustration. The group members were not a cohesive team, and they were displaying their lack of cohesion by not taking even a minimal step to unite them into a more unified group. After venting his anger, however, the author realized that he should have been able to predict the outcome, and if he had predicted it, he might have organized an event more likely to set things on the right course. On the surface, the decision to have a group picnic at an attractive beach would seem to be a good one. But there were a number of problems:

1. The event was organized over a weekend in late summer. Many people have alternative weekend plans, however, especially as they try to enjoy the last days of summer before the weather cools.

2. The event was some distance from Yale, and moreover, one could reach it only by car. But many students and some staff don’t have cars. Thus, unless they managed to hitch a ride, they would be unable to come.

3. The event was basically a social event. Even if it served a useful social purpose, many people in the department separate their professional lives fairly clearly from their personal lives, so that fostering personal contacts might do very little to foster team spirit in the workplace.

4. Although some people love beaches, others hate them. The latter view visiting the beach as tantamount to inviting skin cancer to enter their bodies.

The picnic at the beach may have been a creative idea, but it was a bust, as are many other efforts that leaders and managers make to achieve certain goals. Not long ago President Bill Clinton proposed a BTU tax on energy as a way to help pay off the staggering U.S. national debt—a creative idea but one that quickly became apparent was DOA (dead on arrival). There was too much opposition from oil states, from people living in colder regions, from people promised a middle-class tax cut, and from many others as well.

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