We should all agree that steronz was not a jerk and just go to lunch.
It’s obnoxious that he suggested something that everyone thought was a good idea?
Good point. It sounds like the instructor didn’t keep control of her class very well.
We don’t know that. There may have been some people who wanted to continue the lesson and discuss it with the presenter. But who wants to be known as the guy who made us stay in the stupid exercise instead of going to lunch. I think what he did was jerkish and not within the spirit of the lesson. If you dislike programs like this, find a job that doesn’t have them. Don’t bitch to me if the company is trying to help you acquire and finesse new skills.
Oh, one of these things? “Select survival equipment to take from the following list?” I’ve done some of those in school, and what stood out to me was the astounding dumbassery of some of my teammates. My teammates usually insisted on using a handgun’s sound to signal the pilot of a jet helicopter flying a thousand feet overhead instead of a flare gun, or carrying forty pounds of water apiece while wading through deep snow in the stream-filled North Woods, and so on.
It’s been decades since I did those survival-themed exercises, though, so I have to assume most of those former teammates are now dead.
I don’t agree. He did reach consensus and in a very valuable way: by getting the group to care more about a positive future reward than their differences of opinion. This is pretty much the definition of leadership.
Furthermore he did not allow his group to become ego-involved in the concept of a “right solution.” Instead he motivated them to set aside their egos for mutual benefit. This also shows leadership.
I don’t think the participants in the group lost out on anything. Remember it was not a course in negotiation it was a course in leadership. They saw effective leadership and creative problem solving in action. I haven’t heard too many people complaining Alexander the Great lacked leadership skills, when he cut the Gordion Knot in half with his sword.
They reached a consensus. Usually that means a little arm twisting. Don’t you think that if they had done it the instructor’s way, a couple of folks would have gone along just to get along? That’s how it works in the real world.
ETA: Or, what Hello Again said.
It’s not the OP’s fault that the exercise was flawed.
Well hell, even if they’d actually gone through the whole song-and-dance, there’s a possibility someone would have been lurking in the background thinking, “I really think Guy#7 was the most responsible, but I don’t want to hold things up.” They reached a consensus, and they reached it quickly. Bravo to the OP. Team-Building Synergy bullshit can suck it.
This sounds like a viable solution to me. Nobody in the group objected to this so they all felt the same way. Something got done swiftly as opposed to hours wasted in discussion on a problem that has no needed solution in any other way than an output had to be generated. This is how all organizations should function.
If it was a course that people had chosen to go on and paid good money (or had their company pay good money) for it, then yes, you were a jerk.
If you were made to go on the course, as was every other poor soul there, then no, you weren’t a jerk.
But there is a lesson here for the real world. For example:
“Yes, I know the ISO9000 procedures are bullshit, but without them the company tanks, so the faster we do them, the faster we can get back to whatever we were doing.”
This is a brilliant idea.
The OP asked, “Was I a jerk or not?” not “Did I reach a consensus within my group?”. I do think the OP demonstrated leadership skills by assessing the situation and taking action, which is what leaders are supposed to do. But they don’t always satisfy everyone and sometimes you wind up snubbing someone, in this case the instructor. Politely saying, “Here - here’s your stinking exercise. Can we get out of this boring class for a while?” isn’t the nicest thing to do. That said, I’d be happy to be in the same group as the OP. I wouldn’t be too pleased if I were the instructor, though. They’re probably thinking, “God - another smart ass. Can’t you just go along with the damn class so everyone else doesn’t do the same thing?”
We did the plane crash one recently. Basically, from the scoring we learned that my group was collectively dumber than any of us were individually.
I find it interesting that whether or not people think **steronz **was being a jerk depends on how valuable they think these sort of corporate training activities are. I think it’s pretty arrogant to assume that there is nothing you can learn from one of these exercises.
Generally the point of these exercises is to demonstrate how different people will interact differently in group situations, depending on their personality type (these exercises are often accompanied by a Meyers-Briggs type personality framework). For example, you may have one jerk who thinks he knows everything and attempts to dominate the discussion while more introverted members opt not to participate. Silence is not consent. Just because someone does not object does not mean they are in agreement. And in an organizational setting, this can lead to long-term problems if a large number of your employees feel marginalized and stew in silence.
So from a leadership perspective, the OP did not demonstrate anything other than the failure of the instructor or the class.
Thinking about it, I’d say that has been my experience with group exercises, too. I guess that’s why we have the idea of something that doesn’t work particularly well being “designed by committee.”
I think the OP showed leadership
I think the exercise leader showed a lack of leadership
I think the OP also reached a good solution – paretto (“80/20”) suggests that whatever the suggestion the single individual made, in a very small percentage of the time allotted for the exercise, was probably quite close to what the final result would have been
Bottom line – they may not have learned the lesson the instructor intended form them to learn, but they did learn a lesson in leadership, as well as in accepting the “good” and rejecting the striving for the “perfect.”
There’s always the potential of there being some wiener in the group who’s going to be bullied around. Had they taken the time to discuss and rank blame, that same wiener was just as likely to not agree with the consensus, but remain silent anyway because he’s a wiener. There’s really nothing you can do about that in group situations.
It’s really simple. You did something that benefited you at the cost of hurting the instructor. Hurting people for your own benefit, no matter how slight, is being a jerk.
That said, I don’t know if your particular jerkishness was uncalled for. That’s the part that depends on the class. It seems that a healthy majority (if not everyone) thought the class was useless. A good teacher would not have let the class think that if she didn’t want it to work out like this.
What about getting a job at the expense of all the other applicants? What about intercepting a pass and returning it for a touchdown? What about being the winning bidder on a house that someone else really wants? There are all sorts of ways to act without being a jerk that both benefit yourself and necessarily hurt someone else.
Exactly. I could argue that by exposing the flaws in the exercise he did both the instructor and the company a favor.
Couldn’t you expose a “flaw” in just about every training exercise by pointing out that you believe it to be unrealistic and/or a waste of your time?
The OP was just being a smartass. Not a big deal. But personally I wouldn’t feel too smug about my having observed that a particular training exercise was pointless or manipulative.
Some one who has the authority to order him and his fellow trainees to waste their time in this training, thought it worthwhile. My interest in keeping my paychecks coming far outweigh my interest in revealing the “truth” about about how my bosses instruct me to spend my time.
If you’ve ever taken any kind of management or leadship class in the government then you have done this exercise. I’ve done it 3 or 4 times in various forms and I can’t wait for the day someone steps up and does what steronz did. Maybe then the teacher will explain what mindlessly following a group to avoid causing trouble has to do with leadership. I really can’t help feeling that these sorts for exercises are designed to reveal the lack of leadership in us all.