We Don’t All Have to Be Good at Everything, but We Should Value Those Other Things

Last month, Deborah Meehan shared the following reflections on leadership and leadership development:

For example, the assumption of many leadership development programs with a set of leadership competencies is that each participant needs to have all of these competencies. Why? When we lead with others why does each person need to have all of these competencies when they could be distributed within the group that is leading some action?

The weekend before I read Deborah’s post, I had listened to Tim Ferris’s interview with the magician, Penn Jillette (of Penn & Teller fame). The whole interview is really good and worth listening to. But I was particularly struck by Penn’s revelation that he had a terrible visual memory, which you might imagine would be a problem for a magician. How was he able to compensate for this, Ferris asked? Penn’s response:

My compensation is Teller. Teller has a phenomenal visual memory. And if you watch Teller and I work, you can very clearly see that Iā€™m doing a radio show. Every bit that I write, I bring to Teller as me doing voiceover from off stage while stuff happens on stage. And then he moves me onto the stage, moves me as part of the action.

Here’s the re-frame that I would offer for leadership development that I use with my own teams. It’s not important for everyone to be good at everything. But it’s important for everyone to value ā€” truly, deeply value ā€” the different competencies. And it’s hard to truly, deeply value those other competencies unless you’ve had a chance to experience what it’s like with them and what it’s like without them.

When I’m working with new collaboration practitioners in a meeting context, I always make them responsible for logistics and operations. Most collaboration practitioners who come to me are not good at these things, nor do they care to be good at them. They usually want to learn how to be good facilitators, and they think facilitation is all about presence or group dynamics or personal development.

However, when it comes to bringing a group alive, design is much more important than facilitation, and logistics are a critical part of design. When you’re in a poorly lit room with heavy, inadequate quantities of food, your meeting is going to suffer. When your participants have trouble checking into their hotels or are not clear on where the meeting is, your meeting is going to suffer. When you’ve planned a whole module around posters hanging up around the room, only to learn that you’re not allowed to hang things on the wall, your meeting is going to suffer.

Many collaboration practitioners look at this as an opportunity to improvise. Sure, improvisation is an important competency, but why put yourself in this position in the first place when it’s completely unnecessary? The reason most practitioners put themselves in this position is that they don’t like to handle the logistics and they think they can get by without it. And that’s often true. But this logic breaks down as the stakes get higher.

What I try to teach others is to value the things that are in your control so that, in the moment, you can be fully present to the things that you can’t. My end goal isn’t to make every collaboration practitioner good at logistics. My end goal is to have collaboration practitioners value it, so that if they’re not good at it, they recruit people who are, and they learn to work well with them.

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