When art critics probe the work of the recently deceased it is customary for them to say (if the artist has been in any way charismatic) that the art may not outlive the memory of the artist.
Mostly they are wrong.
This was said of a retrospective exhibition of Derek Jarman’s painting following the artist/film-maker/diarist’s very public death from AIDS in 1994.
That critic no longer writes.
Jarman’s films, however, continue to be shown, his paintings exhibited and I will, as usual, give copies of Modern Nature, Dancing Ledge, and Smiling in Slow Motion to new friends at Christmas.
But I digress.
The books are not held in stock here in Auckland, one of the philistinic capitals of rugger-buggerdom in the world, even by Unity Books, but are still in print and my friend Carol from The Women’s Bookshop in Ponsonby will always get them for me (or anyone).
Her partner Claire is a regular contributor to the radio programme I co-host.
We chat about new books of interest to the LGBT community and had done so for over a year before we actually met.
We had developed an on-air ‘relationship’ and I wondered if meeting face-to-face might challenge this. I suspect we were both surprised by what we experienced, but our relationship was strengthened by the personal contact and we work very well together.
Recently she joined an on-air discussion about SPAM with the comment ‘I don’t actually want my penis enlarged, and I have no interest in sex with horses!’
Normally demure, Claire’s quip stopped me in my tracks. Do we ever really know anyone that well?
But I digress.
To celebrate the conclusion of a post graduate leadership paper I had taken and because I was still in denial about a few recent experiences and found writing about them painful, I slipped away from my office to the UBS (University Book Shop) and buried myself in Margaret Attwood, PD James and the commonplace beauty of the mundane – pens, folders, clippy things, the detritus of business and study – when I sensed rather than saw someone I knew.
From the well-practiced corner of my eye I saw the last person in the world I wanted to see, one of those people who – whilst one of my heroes, a person to look up to, a leader of quality, a kaumatua, a wit, urbane, handsome, a ‘don’ (both Oxford and La Cosa Nostra) – is also capable of penetrating every artifice I have leaving me feeling bare and inadequate.
I doubt this ‘cousin of Dorothy’ would have survived fifty years in academe without this native and well-practiced skill.
We like each other, are drawn to each other, and in situations ‘chaired’ by others, function well together, but alone together his impenetrability terrifies me. Even picturing him sunbathing naked on Takapuna beach, a practice he is known for, fails to diminish his stature, enhances it perhaps, who knows.
Sadly for both of us, not only his designer daywear hangs in his closet.
He was wearing an elegant dark suit and, despite being well over 70, looked like a model from GQ.
I am further from being this person than Robbie Deans is from being the All Black coach but still, a part of me aches for such elegance. He reminds me, and has since I first met him in the mid ‘80’s, of the late-in-life hero of Stephanie Johnston’s The Shag Incident despite it being highly unlikely that he ever played the oval ball game.
I have little doubt the corner of his highly skilled eye found me also but he chose not to make contact and for that I was most grateful. It was only then that I realised quite how ‘opened up’ I’d been by the process I was in the bookshop to avoid writing about.
But I digress.
As often happens when I experience a moment of truth something really excellent occurs almost immediately afterwards, as though shouting across the wilderness of my psyche ‘yes of course that’s right, what took you so long, sheeesh!’
My favourite prose writer of all time is Martin Amis.
Son of Kingsley.
Lucky Jim.
I always think, lucky Martin.
I also hate Martin Amis because I read far faster than he can write and the result is a void in my life. If life were fair he would send me something every day. Despite regularly revisiting London Fields, Dead Babies, The Rachel Papers and the autobiographical Experience there is nothing quite like ‘the new book’.
In attempting to avoid a meeting that might have destroyed/healed me, I moved along the shelf and there it was, screaming at me from its yellow dust-jacket in black graffiti text.
A new Martin Amis
I rushed to the counter with my purchases – Mrs Wishy Washy Makes a Splash and a shiny My First Words.
When my lovely spouse asks that most feared question ‘what do you want for Christmas’ I have my answer – two birds with one stone.
Then it struck me.
Maybe I haven’t been digressing at all.
Maybe digression is another way of reflecting – another way for the psyche to sieve the shards of experience and build a new window in a new place, a new way of seeing, a new way of looking at the world.
If it is, then I became a tad more skilled at it today.
Seriously, I made a decision not to write this until after the last leadership class because I have wasted countless hours of my life as a theatre critic forming my opinion before the first interval (often earlier) and having a few pithy Parkerisms – he played the king as though waiting for someone else to play the ace; all the world’s a stage, some of us just have better seats – in reserve, the whole being driven by the imperative of The Deadline.
Being a slow learner it took some years for me to drag the truth out from behind my ego (and the satisfaction of seeing my name in the by-line – the critic, not Clapton, is God after all). I preached the power of resonance in the theatre but never let it happen to me. It was sufficient, I thought, to know that it was possible.
Sheeesh!
My point (yes, I do have one) is that, in the Recipe for Reflection, it would seem that there needs to be more than a pinch of thyme.
So I’ve taken the time.
I’ve taken the time to reflect on the paper and the group presentations we made to each other, and to Joline Francoeur, that most perceptive and wonderful woman, our ‘leader’.
In retrospect, the group presentations exposed one important point – despite experiencing some difficulties we were not alone. The experience seemed to be universal, only the minutiae differed, and the ways each group dealt with these idiosyncratic differences.
Our Best Practices document was created with good intentions and, in the main served us (and we it) quite well.
This may sound strange but at the end of the day we do have to be accountable to each other for what we promise and what we deliver. On the other hand we also need to be flexible and sensitive to the unique nature of each member and to try to understand how they may act and react in any collegial situation.
It isn’t sufficient to say ‘I know Fred’ and leave it at that.
I suspect we didn’t do this very well.
We also took at face value what each said without ever asking ‘how likely is it that this person will deliver what they are promising?’
One member of our group was quite desperate to be the leader/manager/driver.
I for one allowed this to happen in, I thought, the spirit of the exercise while harbouring serious doubts due to past experience as to whether this would ultimately be a good thing.
I have to be honest and say that, had this been a project where the team had been assembled to share a vision of mine, I would have been insistent that this group member function as a team member and not take a controlling role as the desire to control seems to be driven by a combination of a lack of trust and a need to be seen as ‘the achiever’.
The best teams are those where all the members feel like achievers and these teams accelerate using the fuel of mutual trust.
There is no question in my mind that I walked a path I have walked many times before in that I presumed everyone in the group had the same personal values that I have namely, that I promise the maximum I think I can deliver and then try to better it.
This is a way of ensuring that I don’t turn procrastination into an art form and can usually feel that I’ve done my best whatever the circumstances.
I guess, using a theatre example, if we open on Saturday and there are props to be made on Wednesday I don’t go to bed until they are made. I get personal satisfaction from this and also am able to put another tick in a box for the final product. I quite simply don’t rest until the job is done because experience tells me that if time is wasted it’s the one thing that you can’t get back – and its loss always compounds. Do it, do it now, identify problems, anticipate more, predict what’s coming, put in place change registers if the changes are going to cost money – and rest when it’s done.
I expected my colleagues would have the same values and when we discussed what one saw as my failure to assist at the ‘panic’ stage of the written project I was completely taken aback as I’d assumed they knew they only had to say they needed assistance and I’d be there – through the night if necessary.
I was greeted with ‘I went to bed at 9.00pm, I was exhausted’ and ‘We thought you’d lost interest’.
Clearly my assumptions about their commitment, and their understanding of mine were at odds.
To me this was a little like having the team tell me at half time that it was my fault we lost when there was still the second half of the game to play and that’s when I was to achieve what we had agreed I would do.
There was certainly some ‘group think’ going on and I found this acutely uncomfortable because being told I had ‘lost interest’ in a project I was fully committed too was a totally new experience.
But then the cry of ‘group think’ on my part may simply be a justification of my own behaviour – although two of the three who expressed the concern at the time (the day we handed the project in) have since acknowledged that we did assign tasks, and that the area I had been most responsible for had been, at that time, still in the process stage.
The outcome was a rather serious discussion during which I felt I had to put my case strongly. Receiving a brick wall response I went back to work and, in the privacy of a darkened theatre (my equivalent of a cave I guess – my manager even calls it ‘the cave’) I did some serious thinking about our processes and my part in them.
It’s almost as though the loading of the material and the formatting of the document became the project, and little or no value was being placed on the other components of the work – the research for example.
I’d spent three days in a search of the New Zealand Companies Office website for information about Allied Foods and Purity Foods, of Australian Companies Office data for information about George Weston Foods, the parent company of Purity, and a similar search of the British equivalent for information regarding the overall owner of George Weston Foods, the British food giant Associated British Foods Ltd – none of this information found its way into the assignment but it was vital to understanding who did what to whom when the company was put up for sale.
I discovered, for example, that a nominee company had been created in 1997 (since stuck off) which was a year before the management change and way before the company was actually put on the market which suggests that the owner and the then CEO had known of the possibility of the sale a long time before the new CEO was even appointed and that this company was created to facilitate this process. Even the current CEO didn’t know about that!
I felt good about this and other research that I contributed but it wasn’t ultimately valued because it wasn’t ‘written work’.
It seems important now that we didn’t start by clearly knowing why we were a team in the first place. This would have ensured that our personal and operational goals were in harmony and would have allowed personal agendas to be stated.
Two members said they would be happy with B grades and I didn’t speak up at that point for fear of appearing to be marks driven. I’m not especially driven by marks but I cannot see any point in taking something on unless the aspiration level is high. Want what you’ve always wanted and you’ll get what you’ve always got. I want the best and I’m prepared to work for it, if the best possible outcome is an A+ or a trip to the World Cup, that’s what I want. Once at the world Cup, I would then want to win it. I see no merit in aspiring to mediocrity.
Our team communication strategy originated from a set of instructions proposed by Hall and Watson (1970). These instructions provide the following guidelines for group interaction:
1. Avoid arguing,
2. Avoid win-lose statements,
3. Avoid changing opinions in order to reduce conflict,
4. Avoid conflict-reducing techniques such as majority votes and bargaining.
5. View differences of opinion as natural and initial agreements as suspect.
These are great team behavioural objectives and, on a scale of 1 to 5, 5 being highest, I would score our success rate as:
1. 4
2. 4
3. 3/4
4. 5
5. 4
However, we fell into the trap of evaluating the project as though it was over after only two thirds of the journey had been completed.
We failed to revisit AND REVIEW the best practices document with enough rigour.
Meetings outside the main meeting were not used productively.
We agreed to share everything and we didn’t.
We fell into the trap of judging ideas based on popularity and the force with which they were presented rather than on merit.
We failed to revisit our issues and frame them in new ways.
We didn’t view conflict as potentially productive but saw it as a reason to further divide the team.
We didn’t really discuss our major differences.
We allowed small differences to become the focus.
We didn’t own the problem and manage the crisis.
We used blame as a punishment tool.
We allowed one person to become vital to the achievement of the task.
Distilled, our team ground to a halt because one person wanted to do the work and we accepted that offer without any checks or balances. When that person spun-out we didn’t use the skill-sets of team members to solve the problem but instead allowed having a problem to become the problem.
Responding emotionally to having a problem cost us two potentially productive days.
For all this, ours was still quite an effective team.
There were times when we functioned efficiently and times when we were less so, the latter being explained away by too great a reliance on the Belbin analysis .
Having undertaken the Self Perception Inventory great store was placed on its result in determining what ‘types’ we were deficient in rather than looking to the experiential strengths of the team members. Belbin is a guide only and, even then, only looks to isolate certain facets of group dynamics. It is a tool, not an end in itself and I suspect we allowed it to become one, the outcome being that we spent more time bemoaning the fact that we lacked a chairperson type than actually looking at what skills we had in the group and appointing someone – or looking laterally at the problem to find another solution.
Despite this, our team wasn’t very role focussed but was more personality driven.
Leadership styles within the team were as varied as everything else about us.
Having experienced the pleasure of all the presentations I was acutely aware of how broadly we were scoped, yet how universal our problems had been. We had the broadest age range, the most diverse cultural mix, the most diverse academic experience, even (probably) the most expansive gender range yet the issues that caused us concern were also experienced by at least two other groups.
Our leadership styles were equally diverse and it’s probably useful to start by saying what we didn’t have: we had no coercive and no truly authoritative types in this situation.
In most instances I would see this as no bad thing, erring as I do towards facilitation and coaching wherever possible. In large projects where I am the designated leader (it’s my vision people have bought into) I like to work democratically as there are tasks that need to be completed, but the affiliative style is also something I aspire to. Depending on need, in large group situations, I vacillate between affiliative and coaching roles.
Acknowledgement of success and achievement is important to me but only if it comes without coercion – I hate to think I would ever, by subliminal messages, have people acknowledge me because they think I need it rather than because it is what they truly feel.
We did have two affiliative/democrats, one pace-setter and one democrat/coach.
We also had one participant who found our journey a bit more confusing than might have been hoped and we all have to take responsibility for this.
We undertook to reflect collectively, face-to-face, on the process on the same day we made final decisions about the project presentation.
I chaired this meeting as I was responsible for ensuring that the latter part of the project came in on time and to a quality we were all happy with.
I won’t deny that I had decided to chair this meeting anyway as we seemed, as a self-directed group, to become a bit rudderless at times and, as this was to be our last meeting before the presentation I didn’t want it to become a slanging match as we still had work to do and relationships to maintain.
Despite some tension, there was a lot of goodwill throughout the meeting, in fact throughout the entire twelve weeks.
The concerns expressed at the meeting were twofold: one team member had failed to perform at all, and one (myself), who, it was perceived hadn’t done enough for the assignment at the time of the panic. This view was driven by one team member and the rest of us said what they felt about this view. I left the meeting feeling battered for a second time, far beyond what seemed appropriate given the level of my perceived failure.
Over-reaction of this nature often suggests a hidden motive (in plays anyway) and in this case I suspect the team member concerned had become fearful that the two ‘failures’ were going to cause her mark to be lower than she felt she deserved and, as her need to achieve was linked to her perception of herself, her response reflected that drive as much as the actual event itself.
Psych101accordingtome.
The second issue, separate but linked, was marks distribution.
I knew private conversations had taken place regarding marks distribution and I knew this to be an issue for one team member as she had said as much to me.
I was aware that she felt that marks should not be evenly distributed so it came as a surprise when this was not mentioned when the agenda item was reached and we left the meeting still with no decision made.
I feel as though I’ve learned a lot from the experience of being in this team.
Easy to say.
Not quite so easy to put into words what that learning is or how it will impact but my instinct is that it will be quite significant.
I work a lot in teams – it’s my recette pendant la vie – and I think I’ve learned at least some of the factors necessary to enable a team to function and also some of the factors that can make a very good team an excellent one.
What makes an excellent team sublime is, however, a mystery. If it weren’t it would become commonplace – and who wants a Burger King life?
Perhaps the most important learning for me actually falls into the category of ‘remembering to remember’.
I KNOW as well as I know my name that to function in a team you need to think what you say, say what you think and always say ‘yes’ unless there is a profound reason to say no.
When I forget this I am in trouble.
I need to say ‘yes, I will listen, yes I am listening, yes I hear.’
Somehow this became a distant echo after I got my first emotional battering.
I did what I so often do: I disengaged emotionally – and worked harder.
Did I enjoy my battering?
No, I didn’t – because I sensed it was actually about something else.
Mostly, when I’m wrong I accept it quite readily, some would say too readily. In this instance I thought there were factors being ignore and I was being made one of the scapegoats.
And when that happens I do not respond well because my sense of self worth goes down the toilet.
I fight the self-worth battle constantly so I know the field quite well.
And it’s my blood I smell.
I had to keep reminding myself that our team consisted of five widely diverse people who might otherwise never have worked together, selected, to some extent, at random, who travelled to the other side of town for meetings from Hillsborough, South Auckland, and the CBD. Where people choose to live and why – in fact ALL the choices they make in their lives – can be used as indicators as to how they might behave in teams.
It has to be said that ‘how’ team members are chosen is a critical factor for team success, ‘what’ their skills are and how these factors knit together is of equal importance, and the need for a shared vision is then the top priority.
It’s been said that we ‘bonded’ but I’m not so sure.
I think we came together happily and in a positive frame of mind to approach the task.
Three members of the team immediately said how glad they were that they weren’t in ‘so and so’s’ team. I didn’t care whose team I was in. Working in a team is always a challenge and can always be made to be fun.
I’m going to do something I don’t really care for now: I’m going to insert a direct quote because when it comes to theories about how people behave in learning situations ‘nobody does it better’ than Chris Argyris.
In ‘Teaching Smart People How to Learn’, Chris Argyris says:
‘When you observe people’s behaviour and try to come up with rules that would make sense of it, you discover a very different theory of action – what I call the individual’s “theory-in-use.”
Put simply, people consistently act inconsistently, unaware of the contradiction between their espoused theory and their theory-in-use, between the way they think they are acting and the way they *really* act. (my bold).
What’s more, most theories-in-use rest on the same set of governing values.
There seems to be a universal human tendency to design one’s actions consistently according to four basic values:
• To remain in unilateral control;
• To maximize “winning” and minimize “losing”;
• To suppress negative feelings; and
• To be as “rational” as possible – by which people mean defining clear objectives and evaluating their behaviour in terms of whether or not they have achieved them.
The purpose of all these values is to avoid embarrassment or threat, feeling vulnerable or incompetent.
In this respect, the master programme that most people use is profoundly defensive. Defensive reasoning encourages individuals to keep private the premises, inferences, and conclusions that shape their behaviour and to avoid testing them in a truly independent, objective fashion.’
In many ways this sums up the basic flaw in our groups functioning: we lacked courage and when things looked to be getting a bit rough, attack became the first means of defence.
From time to time I endeavoured to influence the way the team interacted and mostly I achieved what I set out to do.
Mostly this related to returning to our vision and retaining a sense of vue d’ensemble.
Quite early on I realised that this was not a team for taking risks or engaging in challenges. The majority wanted to get the job done and in a linear fashion with the least stress or pressure.
I don’t like working in a stressful environment but I do respond well to creative tension. I become calmer rather than allowing the necessity to create order and structure to become panic and anguish (a thousand years in the theatre may have taught me this but also representative sports and far too long in the armed services.
In effect we failed to create ‘an environment that elicits, supports, and nurtures creativity by deliberately upsetting the status quo, escalating some changes while damping others, and seeking a chaordic state or a state of bounded instability’ and this is the method I find most challenging and productive.
As Tetenbaum says ‘Tension is a necessary ingredient of creativity, but it will take particular skill on the part of leaders to keep the tension level at a point where it generates dynamic imagination without exceeding people’s ability to handle the stress engendered.’ While we rather prided ourselves on being ‘the creatives’ we behaved in a somewhat less than creative manner eventually allowing our modus operandii to become stress rather than tension-related.
We also failed to observe Andrew Groves’ maxim that teams should: ‘continually try to prove themselves wrong, to challenge thinking, to find flaws in their own mental models, to continually experiment and test every possible alternative.’
In fact, we largely failed to develop the most important elements essential to creativity: personal flexibility and a willingness to take risks.
We had all the requisite skills and abilities, we just didn’t use them!
Again to quote Tetenbaum, whose Newton to Chaos paper I found particularly stimulating, ‘to voluntarily annihilate one’s ideas, however, is not as ego-satisfying as having them confirmed’ and there were times when I felt we were more inclined towards confirmation and reinforcement than towards constructive destabilisation and making new discoveries.
Our team had one member who seemed to have difficulty comprehending what was required of her and what she needed to do.
In every other way she was a great team member and provided support and empathy at every step of the journey. It was some time before I identified the difficulty she had with English because in many ways her communication skills seemed adequate.
I was at a loss as to how best to encourage her to feel part of the group and, despite my best efforts (and I suspect the best efforts of the rest of the group) she remained confused about her function and what she needed to do.
I was touched when she made a point of waiting behind one night to introduce me to her father. Having a number of Samoan friends I think I understood the significance of this and was humbled that she felt strongly enough that I should meet her family.
As a group we never came to terms with this member’s needs and I feel we failed her somewhat. I was disappointed to hear a team member suggest that she was the university’s problem and not ours because compassion is everyone’s business.
I don’t feel that sufficient recognition was given to this member for the free sharing of cultural insights, a vital component of our otherwise palagi understanding of the PI workforce. What she was able to share, she shared freely and openly. Her self evaluation was perceptive and touching.
I’d like to end with two quotes that mean a lot to me, the former relates to this group experience, the latter I almost totally agree with.
Emotional leadership is the spark that ignites a company’s performance, creating a bonfire of success or a landscape of ashes.
In my view we failed to create the bonfire of success, but we did manage to avoid a landscape of ashes.
Work is life for me, it is the only point of life – and with it there is almost religious belief that service is everything.
I don’t agree that work is the ‘only’ point of life, but the people I truly respect never did anything by halves!
That I do admire.
And a wee quote for the lovely Joline:
“I can no other answer make, but, thanks, and thanks”
Twelfth N, Act iii, Sc.3
And apropos of nothing, Derek Jarman (remember him, he was my original digression and the man quoted in the title of this note) never backed off when it came to respect for artists.
If you want to understand his journey in the arts there are a dozen or so books (I recommend ‘Kicking the Pricks’, ‘Modern Nature, ‘Blue’, ‘Chroma’, ‘Smiling in Slow Motion’ as exceptional), an array of films of quality (watch them all, especially if you’re a Tilda Swinton fan) and of course the paintings, the design work and his brilliant garden at Dungeness.
He was a man whose life was a work of art. He was a man of passion who stood his ground when the quicksands beneath his feet were sinking lesser souls.
His legacy is enormous.
Now that’s a digression worth remembering.
Tuesday, 29 December 2009
dykiegirl 