situational leadership

Yesterday I spent the whole workday in Part One of a pilot program all about Personal Power in the Workplace. For some reason HR picked me as one of the non-management people in the company to participate in this spanking new class and then give feedback. I was pretty annoyed when I first got the email about my mandatory participation, but then I heard about the free lunch and beverages and I thought it was a great idea. Actually, that's not true, I bitched about it until I set foot into the oh-so-classy Foster City Crowne Plaza at 8:30 on Wednesday morning. I think that the two main factors that stopped my complaining were the real cream for my coffee and the 19 other people looking as tired and cranky I as did.

But it wasn't all bad. For example, I learned that my leader behavior tends to lean towards an S3 and that for most projects I am at a follower readiness of R4. However there are some projects where I am an R2 and I simply don't get what I need from an S4 leader and that results in poor performance. See, don't you feel like you know me better now than ever?

Besides filling out worksheets to figure out how to correctly diagnose others and adapt ourselves accordingly, we got to play games. In one game my team was assigned to play the most able and confident team about to compete in the Olympic Bobsled races. I used the opportunity to shout USA, USA, USA, while thrusting my fists into the air. I also got to write things with a purple marker on a flip chart!

I have to say that the most unexpected things I learned were some survival skills in case of a Bushfire. We broke up into teams of 5 and were given this scenario:
We are in Australia and just finished a week of meetings in Melbourne and we are now on our way to have a small holiday at an associate's house near Sassafras. (we are also told how many kilometers Sassafras is from Melbourne and what roads we take to get to the house, but I'll leave that out, because if you're like me you'll get heart palpitations thinking it's a math problem) The house and the area around the house are described to us in detail. Now here comes the scary part... Unfortunately it's brushfire season during our holiday. After we get to the house, unpack, take a hike and have some lunch we lose power. Eventually someone notices smoke. Finally someone notices the ash, embers and charred leaves falling from the sky. aaaaaahhhh!

After all that information was given to us we were then given a list of 12 assets and our task was to rank them according to importance. We first work on this task as an individual and then as a team. The items were things like keys to the car, a map, a ladder, 3 sets of snorkels, masks and flippers, 3 buckets... I felt very MacGyver.

Long story short, I died. And as team we also perished. Because what they don't tell you in this segment of the situational leadership course is that you are unable to flee from the area. You have to stay at the house. So bascially we all wasted 35 minutes negotiating for things as if we were on our merry way to Sassafras, when apparently if crap from a fire starts falling from the sky it's best to put on as much clothing as possible, drink water constantly and hunker down with a hose and buckets and start wetting things down. Who knew? The best part of this exercise was figuring out that if we got in the giant aluminum water tank that held 1,300 gallons of water (with the snorkels and masks, of course!) that we would most likely boil.

So now I'm off to Part Two, where I get to do some more exercises and find out what patterns of speech I use, whether my leader style is more democratic or autocratic and how to work best with personal power as opposed to position power. Look out everyone, because I'm feeling very R4 today and I'm gonna get me some POWER!