Unidentified object from the late 1800’s

Recently, we dug in the dirt at our property to see what things we could find. We encountered an unusual brass object nearby coins dated in the late 1800’s and some clay marbles. At the same spot in 1893, there was a thriving livery (stable), a shoe repair (cobbler) and two other small one-story wood structures with unknown purposes.

So what is the brass object?

With our modern frame of reference, we can’t process the clues provided to be able to know what this object is. We know its probable creation date, its geographic location and what it was near. However, we are missing context of its the process or human behaviors that were common in that time and place and may have used the object for something. We simply don’t have the context to be able to interpret the information provided about this object to be able to “know” what the object is.

So what does context have to do with leadership and team capabilities? A lot. Imagine that you were asked to create a product without knowing who it was used for, why it is being built, or the advantage of the product to the marketplace?

WHY WE ALL NEED CONTEXT

We live and work in a knowledge economy. Modern algorithms and machine intelligence use more data than ever before. Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (VUCA) is a new norm. To effectively navigate this world, we need to combine our collective thought capacity in ways that enable us to interpret larger and more complex situations than before. It’s a business necessity.

Not many individual minds can handle broad complexity such as VUCA. But our collective minds can. Enabling collective minds to think and produce outcomes that reach organizational goals require that the team is provided solid context.

It is generally agreed that the interpretation of information, in any form, is context-dependent (Ontology Summit 2018 Communique: Contexts in context)

THE CONTEXT CONTINUUM

Leaders have different innate capacity to know how to provide context to their teams. Leaders modeling their style after a command and control model frequently keep context a secret from their teams. In their mind, context is something only a leader needs to know. On the other end of the spectrum, Socratic leaders ask questions to guide their teams through reasoning processes that produce desired business outcomes. Here are some narrative examples showing no context, partial context and solid context in the examples below.

Example 1: No Context

Leader: I need you to finish this project by the end of next week.

Team Member: But I don’t have capacity

Leader: Well our Vice President is telling our Director to get it done, so we just have to do it

Do you think the team member feels valued?

Example 2: Partial Context

Leader: I need you to finish this project by the end of next week

Team Member: But I don’t have capacity

Leader: Well it is critical for us to be able to improve guest satisfaction so we have to get this done

Team Member: Oh. Then is our goal to improve guest satisfaction?

Leader: Well our Vice President is telling our Director to improve guest satisfaction, so we just have to do it

Team Member: There might be a better way to improve guest satisfaction than this project.

Leader: Tough. We just have to do this the way the VP says.

Do you think this team member feels “heard” or “included”?

example 3: Solid Context

Leader: Taking you back to the dialogue we had at our meeting last week, our new CIO was explaining how we needed to have a relentless focus on guest satisfaction

Team Member: Yes I remember

Leader: Our latest web statistics indicate that we are only at a 50% guest satisfaction rating.

Team Member: I saw that, and our team talked about it together and think we know how to change the flow to improve that situation

Leader: You did?

Team Member: Yes, we figured out a way to remove ten clicks from the process and it will take us a couple of weeks to finalize design and implement it, but we think we could really improve that rating.

Leader: That sounds great. I know the VP wanted to get this aspect done by the end of next week, but I can go explain your approach and I am sure you could get the time to do this right.

This team member feels valued, heard and included.

Reading through these examples. Example 1 and 2 don’t encourage team member contribution to the whole. The third example reveals a spark of team production and creativity. The leader provided context, asked a question, then encouraged them to think for themselves and make a contribution. This simple example shows how simply providing context can enhance both team member self-worth, their personal happiness, individual contribution as well as team performance. Plus - the leader even achieved the initial objective

Next Steps

Learning to do this first takes commitment by the leader, then practice. There are many ways to learn about leadership techniques. One great start is the Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team program. Contact us for more information on how to create high performing teams.

And of course, contact us if you know what this object is - because we surely don’t know!