In this post I want to share something that I experienced very recently. I went through a 10 week leadership program where we covered several leadership topics and last Friday we all came together in Chicago to put the learnings in to practice. As part of that, the entire class was broken in to 4 different teams and these teams competed against each other to win a toy project based on a prototype built with 500 Lego pieces. The winning criteria was simple, build something with 500 Lego pieces and the team will be judged based on the quality of the prototype and how well the team worked together and how well they present it to the "client". And during the course of the competition, team members will take turns leading the team and there will be different challenges thrown at the team at regular interval. While it all appeared funny in the beginning, it was eye opening to me by the end of the day.
My team started off good but none of us are "creative Lego minds". So, we struggled a bit with coming up with a concept design but we finally arrived at something and started executing. As the day went by different challenges were thrown at us and we got more than our fair share of tough challenges. Meanwhile our real jobs pulled couple of us away from the competition for a brief period but the entire team was committed to each other and quickly got back to the task at hand which is to finish the project in the given amount of time and pitch it to the client.
As we were half way through the project I realized our product was not the best and we were lot behind the rest of the teams. I started alerting the team and we all agreed that we need to step up our game. As we were trying to kick it up a notch a killer challenge was thrown at us which basically makes our product even worse than what we thought it would be and we were basically out of time to do any changes. I was leading the last segment of the competition and so I was completely down and I was just embarrassed at how we are even going to present the product to the client. I was making comments to that effect to the team and the entire team energy was dwindling. As we were preparing for the presentation, one of the team member said "the product is what it is and we cannot change it now. But now let's sell the heck out of it and let's try and make the best out of it".
Those comments just lifted my energy and I said to myself "let's just do it". We as a team started talking about our presentation strategy and very quickly the entire team dynamic changed to one of more positive and poised mind set. I have decent skills at presenting and selling work and I knew I had team members that are even better than me and can be very effective at selling. We got our plan ready and got ready for our turn. We went before the "client" and presented our prototype and did an outstanding job as a team in selling our concept. We as a team backed each other up and clearly demonstrated our team work and leadership and our vision for the product. All this in our minds was to compensate for our product shortcomings and to save ourselves from a public embarrassment.
And then the results were announced, and we were surprised that my team won the competition! Mind you, this is just a simulated competition to win a toy lego project and so there is not a whole lot to win or lose and the whole idea is to exercise our leadership skills learned through the program. But, the whole experience taught me few important things:
1. As a leader, do not be pessimistic as you can influence the entire team morale by your behavior.
2. Do not give up too early, fight till the very end even if the chances are slim to none.
3. Team morale and mind set play a very critical role in project outcomes, so harness the positive energy for positive outcomes.
P.S: It's worth noting that the team member that reinstated the positive energy back in the team demonstrated true situational leadership in this scenario.
