As I explained earlier, it sounds like the objective was to accomplish a particular task, as a team, by applying concepts covered in the class. Respecting different point of views and personality types, listening to others, knowing how to use people’s strengths to the benefit of the whole team, yadda, yadda, yadda.
By the OP’s own admission, he didn’t want to hear any other views; he wanted to win what he perceived to be a pointless game. So he picked a quiet person to do the ordering because he suspected no one would raise a fuss (a reason that makes no sense to me, actually…why would anyone complain if it was agreed up front that the task was pointless…the particulars of who did what should have ceased to matter), and he was relieved when the quiet person didn’t solicit input from others. Ironically, he didn’t appoint himself to do the ordering because he didn’t want to come across as having a big ego, and yet it was his ego that made him think this game was all about manipulating him and wasting his time. Inarguably, it was also his ego that made him feel satisfied that he outwitted a harmless instructor. I mean, it ain’t like he figured out the formula for Bernoulli’s numbers here. What is there to feel smug about?
I’m not saying it was sacrilegeous to not take the exercise seriously, but it’s kind of amusing to see so many people in this thread acting as if the OP was a lateral thinking genius in this situation. I don’t think military brass would think too highly of a NCO who would respond to a command in the manner that he did. If an officer is given an assigment, no matter how tedious and pointless it is, they should do it to the best of their ability or not do it at all.
Who appraises the results and determines whether they are good or not? It’s the person who gives the commands, not the person who follows them. Ask anyone who has had to fire an employee for doing crappy work and not having the good sense to know its crappy.
The military doesn’t want automatons who can’t think outside the box, but that doesn’t mean it wants people who purposefully go out of their way to produce results that undesirable to their superiors.
The exercise was artificially limited and flawed. If I’d been the instructor, I’d have been chagrined as hell to be outmaneuvered so effectively, but I like to think I’d have acknowledged it with humor, rewarded the leadership shown, and asked their assistance in redesigning the exercise to meet the stated goals.
No, the OP was not a jerk. The teacher wasn’t prepared, wasn’t thinking on her feet, and got her butt handed to her.
I don’t see the objective as “to accomplish a particular task.” In the scenarios and roleplaying that I’ve particpated in, there was no emphasis whatsoever on “accomplishing” the task – it could have been ranking the imaginary people as in the OP, or crossing a stream using a rope, or stacking items higher, or dropping an egg without breaking it…but nobody needed to have a bunch of eggs at ground level; nobody wanted to be on the other side of that stream, and just re-crossed it immediately; the stacked items were unstacked and put into bags for the next session.
I don’t see how the OP failed to respect the points of view of other participants – any one of them could have stopped his plan by objecting, and likely would have if he’d been insulting. I don’t see where he failed to use others’ strengths – in ordering a list of names in an admittedly made-up exercise, unless it’s a psychological test, the names and reasons for ranking them in any given order are typically arbitrary.
As far as I can tell, the point of the exercise was to put the team into an arbitrary pressure situation and see what people would do, with an eye toward seeing who showed himself or herself able to generate consensus.
Out of the box thinking. A+. Everyone, including the teacher, learned more by that move than by the scheduled exercise. This assumes things played out just as described in the OP, with consensus.
IMHO the exercise was bullshit and would have illustrated a point but not made anybody in the room a better leader. I am of the opinion that you can shape leaders but you can’t make them out of whole cloth.
If someone disagreed and didn’t stand up and say so, then that person got an F in leaderhip.
I led my company to CMMI Level 3 last year, and spent a year and a half doing exactly what you describe. Well, not exactly, because I believe a lot of it is valid. It worked better than making everyone sit in a seminar for hours with me preaching about how wonderful the stuff is.
It’s not that he didn’t respect other people’s POV; it’s that they were totally irrelevant to him. He saw alternative opinions as being an obstacle in his path, and that’s why he did what he could to avoid eliciting one. Do you really think that’s a sign of what a good leader does when he’s working with a team?
Even if this was the case, that still doesn’t mean the OP excelled at showing leadership. Generating a consensus is really not all that hard if you have a dominant personality and your teammates are indifferent or nonconfrontational people. But the smartest person in the room may be one of those people. In one’s haste to generate a consensus, it’s quite easy to let talent and insightfulness go to waste because you are not actively seeking to utilize it; you’re just trying to get everyone to agree so you can get out of the room.
Everyone keeps flocking to the idea that being a leader means being able to generate a consensus, as if having a whole bunch of sheep agreeing with you has value in and of itself.
I don’t think the OP would have chose this tactic if he thought the instructor was in a position to hurt or advance his career. Do you?
But most groups of people ARE sheep, waiting for a goat to lead them. The OP was the goat in the room; I don’t think you can blame him for not being a sheep.
Leadership is identifying a course of action that will be successful and best for the group, and then getting the group to go for it. Every leader has a different idea of what that action should be. That’s why we have Republican leaders and Democratic leaders who have very different ideas about where to lead us. But they are leaders nevertheless. In the OP’s case, he felt the best direction was to meet the letter but not the spirit of the law and quit wasting everybody’s time. He didn’t bully anybody into following him, and things could have easily have gone the other way if the group–or if even one person in the group–stood up to tell him he was wrong.
ETA: This was more like the case of the little boy who shouted that the emperor has no clothes.
My vote is for non-jerk, based on a couple of things.
Firstly, this was a 6 week long course and this was a single long lunch. Could bickering for an hour have taught the participants something? Maybe, but not likely something they couldn’t have learned in the other 239 hours of the class.
Secondly, this was an officer training course in the Air Force. If someone objected to the solution the onus was on them to speak up. If you’re flying planes or fixing planes, or generally doing stuff where keeping quiet can result in lost lives, being too shy to speak up means you’re not officer material, period.
Finally, debate for the sake of debate is not a leadership skill. It’s a hobby. There are many different ways that the instructor could have taken the answer presented and stretched it into an hour of discussion. That she acquiesced in a minimal amount of time suggests that she was ready for a break too.
Nah, not really. The OP may have believed the emperor had no clothes and may have told his compadres that, but he still went through the rigamole of pretending like the emperor had clothes (presumably so he wouldn’t get in trouble…otherwise he would have just walked out or at least chose to not participate). So no, he shouted nothing.
I’m not arguing that the OP didn’t exhibit leadership, just saying he didn’t exhibit good leadership.
And no, it’s not inevitable that the exercise would have been an 1 hour worth of bickering. I’ve never been in a training course in which the participants actually cared enough about the tasks to bicker.
In the OP’s scenario, I would not be surprised if the other groups wrapped up their assignment shortly after his team left and they spent the rest of the time talking about TV shows. That’s usually how these things work, in my experience. In other words, not that serious.
Here are three things I deeply believe after running a business for many years.
Decisions made by comittee usually are not good and should be avoided. a better approach is to delegate the responsibility for the decision to the person best qualified to handle it and to defer to their opinion.
A quick decision is often the best decision and too much overanalysis at best, wastes time.
Unnecessary internal meeting are a bad business habit and create a sort of masturbatory busywork atmosphere and your time is better spent making something or selling something or , you know, working.
I would’ve given you an A+ but that is why I don’t run corporate training exercises. I find that the point of most of these bs exercises for the trainers is to make seasoned professionals feel like they really don’t know anything…and the seasoned professionals taking the course want nothing more than to figure out what the trainer is looking to hear and to give it back to them so they don’t feel like slow children.
That’s because the exercise was set up in such a way that made consensus the highest goal. They are the ones that put a stupidly high value on “a whole bunch of sheep agreeing.” Given that consensus was the goal, the OP attained it expeditiously.
