Leadership and teams. Making the invisible, visible. Plato's solution

"The world is awash with endless prose of 'good' leadership, projected infinitely onto Plato's cave wall.  And about as useful."

by John Raddall

LEADERSHIP ON THE CAVE WALL - OUR SHADOWY CRISIS

The current pandemic has magnified the weaknesses in our traditional approach to leadership and team development.  Organisations are failing faster than ever and most disturbingly, the majority of employees consider their bosses to be incompetent to lead in the modern era.

Clearly fundamental changes need to be made if academics, consultants and HR departments wish to remain relevant.  The message is clear.  Successful leadership is about action and its evolutionary consequences and not words.

PLATO'S WARNING OF OUR IMAGINARY WORLD

We can learn much in this regard from Plato's Allegory of the Cave, the foundation of two millennia of philosophy, as well as the subject of many movies including The Matrix and The Truman Show.  Yuval Harari encapsulates Plato's allegory as follows - "We live in a real world of rivers, trees and lions and an imaginary world of gods, nations and organisations".  This imaginary world is the shadow in Plato's cave.  And much of our leadership 'knowledge' remains a flickering shadow, divorced from truth and scientific reality.

Our continual search therefore should always be to pursue the truth, to make the invisible, visible.  Bringing the real world into the imaginary world.  

TEAMS AND MAKING THE INVISIBLE, VISIBLE.  FINDING THE 'PERSONA'.

Teams are the basic building blocks of all organisations and their relative success or failure.  If they are so important surely we need to better understand the collective unconscious structure of the team?  Surely we have to make the invisible, visible if we don't want to remain ignorant in Plato's cave?

The challenge is to understand the true nature of the deeper, more complex and dynamic nature of the 'persona' of the team.  In many ways this is something mysterious, and up till now, unknowable.

A BEAUTIFUL SOLUTION

We now have a beautiful solution.  We use the GC Index, which effectively measures the unique energy and impact potential of the individuals in the team.  However the real magic happens when we process all the individual profiles through a specific algorithm to generate a unique and hitherto hidden, team profile and persona.

This data is completely hidden from all team members until the profile is revealed.  Effectively this makes the team's unique but invisible 'persona', visible for the first time.  It converts a flickering shadow in a darkened cave into a phenomenon in the real world.

The slide below shows a GC Index Team Profile, converting the unconscious into the conscious.  In addition it shows the critical impact of the team 'persona' on the organisation, highlighting strengths and weaknesses.

Once the visible has been revealed it can never be returned to the invisible.  It is the beginning of a new evolutionary pathway of team self awareness and superior performance.