Lessons from Media: Bad Shabbos
First off, a quick review: amazing movie. If you’re Jewish, or know Jews, this should have you in tears of joy. I strongly recommend it; if you’re in Boston, it’s currently playing at The Coolidge. Now, on to some leadership lessons, without giving away the plot entirely. The movie is structured around a “meet the parents” Shabbat dinner: an engaged interfaith couple is bringing her Catholic parents to meet his Jewish family … when an accidental death occurs in the apartment.
And now it’s an incident. We get to watch, comedically, as panic sets in. Obviously, no one has an incident plan for “how to deal with a dead body” in their back pocket, but each character’s style comes forth. What we see–which is what most teams experience in their first crisis–is that the veneer of teamwork is stripped away first, and rough edges begin to bump into each other.
Then the true leaders begin to shine. Not by, as most would suppose, having the best plan the fastest, but by following. They recognize that another voice pushing in a different direction will be actively unhelpful, and instead take a step back, and help the team be more efficient, even if the team is headed in the wrong direction. Sometimes, great leadership is letting people fail quickly, rather than avoid failure very, very slowly.
One Minute Pro Tip: Be Right, Not Fast
There’s always a temptation as news is breaking, to use it to score points. Maybe you are pointing out to your leadership how your safety project would have kept the company safe from a bad outcome a competitor recently suffered. Perhaps a colleague’s bad outcome is an opportunity to evangelize your own vision. Or, current events may be amenable to dunking on your political or philosophical opposition.
In any of these cases, it behooves you to be absolutely certain that the news fits your narrative. While the resonance might be obvious to you, if you’re at all incorrect on the facts you assume, then the people you’re picking an argument with will jump on those facts to undercut you, and your reputational hit will last a while. Take a few moments to ask yourself, “what facts might be true that would contradict my narrative?”, and then go look for them.
1% Leadership Chapter 31: Make the smallest and most defensible argument necessary to spur action.
Anti-Leadership Pattern: Non-Violent Communication (NVC)
Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life is a masterpiece, if a bit wordy (but I think that about all leadership books, so that’s not a unique critique). Rephrased, it focuses on how the shorthand that humans use to communicate creates conflict. This conflict arises because a speaker has an entire worldview which they summarize into one statement. A listener, hearing that statement, receives it bereft of context, and must infer their own, even as it is incorporated into their own worldview. In short, conversations are ICBMs tossed across an ocean of misunderstanding. They do not arrive gracefully.
NVC practitioners focus on providing context, and the EEC model of feedback is a good example of this. You share your Experience (NVC practitioners may refer to this as an observation), the Effect it had (NVC: Feelings), and what Change you expect to see (NVC: Needs, Requests). Practiced simply, NVC can be a great book. Practiced to its fullest, though?
Disaster awaits.