Humble Consulting: How to Provide Real Help Faster by Edgar H. Schein

Author:Edgar H. Schein
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Published: 2016-04-03T14:00:00+00:00

CASE 8. The Cambridge-at-Home Committee—A Personalization Failure

A group of friends and acquaintances formed a group to explore the concept of staying in our houses as we aged rather than going into a nursing home. After a few social meetings in which we spoke about the concept in general terms, we decided that it was feasible and turned ourselves into more of a working group that would make “Cambridge-at-Home” an organizational reality. I was one of the more active members, and the group knew that I had a group and organizational background, so it was no surprise that I was asked to chair the group, even though I was not one of the original founders of the group and, for that reason, had somewhat less status.

I realized that our group of eight members had different skills, different levels of involvement, and different expectations, so I decided to be highly laissez faire in letting members who had something to say have their full opportunity to say it. I was, in effect, encouraging a movement toward Level Two on the presumption that a volunteer group like this would not function well unless the members got themselves personally involved. I was pushing personalization through listening carefully to people and giving whoever had an opinion the floor for as long as he or she needed it, especially if the subject was germane to our task. For example, there was a lengthy debate about what pictures should be put on the brochure that would announce our group and the project. One member was particularly adamant and took up a lot of airtime, which I allowed him to have because I thought his involvement would be crucial down the line.

After one meeting when this member had taken a lot of time, I received an e-mail from one of the founding members accusing me of being a terrible chair in “allowing meetings to ramble and encouraging members to drone on who had nothing to contribute.” He alleged that I, of all people, with all my alleged knowledge of groups was showing my “complete incompetence” in how I was chairing this committee. He complained to several other founding members, which led to a separate discussion between me and two of these other members to consider what to do. I explained to them why I was chairing the way I was, “in order to allow members to feel that they were each heard so that they would become appropriately involved, as we needed their commitment later.”

In this conversation I learned an important cultural lesson. The two members with whom I was having this conversation were experienced board members of various volunteer and arts organizations in Cambridge and Boston. They told me in a friendly but firm way that they understood very well what I was trying to do but that most of the group was not used to this level of openness and really preferred the discipline of a more traditional way of running meetings. Though we each had a

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