The Vault presents prior posts from Teach & Serve.
Echo Chambers of Our Own Design
Leaders can live strange lives and much of that has to do with the types of people with which they surround themselves. Confident, strong leaders tend to seek out those who are, likewise, confident and strong. They tend to build teams of people who might and will challenge them, who think for themselves, who generate and create on their own without the leader pressing the issues. Confident leaders want people around them who are confident, too.
Sometimes, however, when we build teams and as those teams continue to function, we can begin to listen only to ourselves, to conclude that our team is the best team – the only team – to which we need to listen. For, if we have constructed good teams, should it not follow that we will remain good in perpetuity? Is it not logical that our teams, woven together with thought and foresight and intentionality, will work perfectly well for a very, very long time?
Be careful.
All too often, the best of teams, especially those teams whose players like and respect each other, become – the longer they work together – echo chambers of our own design. Typically, high functioning teams come to expect high function of themselves and, in order to be well regarded and kept in place, they have done good work. When teams do good work with one another over long periods of time and they are praised for such work, it becomes very challenging to believe that they will ever do anything but good work. It becomes almost impossible to believe that breaking up the band, that deviation from the norm is necessary.
But it may well be. It is, at a minimum, necessary to open the doors on these teams, to bring in other voices, to challenge the echo chamber.
High functioning teams that wish to remain high functioning do not simply gaze around the table and say, every part we need is here?
Right? Yes, sure. Right. Right back at you.
That kind of echo chamber does not grow leadership in a building and it does not grow to face new challenges. Rather, high functioning teams look around the table and say, we are good. How do we get better? What is missing?
That is how to break open the echo chamber and continue to grow.