By Dr Charles Leyman Kachitsa
You need to understand the intricacies of any role that you find yourself in. Most people desire positions but once they have attained the position do not take the effort to understand their detailed tasks and responsibilities on the role. In that regard most like the titles, the respect and if any, benefits that come with their positions without taking any attempts to show their contribution on to the new role, the team or organisation in general.
One of the research areas this author is interested in is transferability of skills and processes where simply systems learn from each other. To explain the narrative in the first paragraph, we borrow the specifications on different roles in sports especially football. The game has mainly four main areas of different roles that working together make a team complete and likely to accomplish its objective. These are: goalkeeping, defenders, mid-field players and attackers often called strikers or forwards.
Goalkeeper make sure to prevent the ball mainly from opposition or any other stray ones miskicked by own players from entering the goal when play is live. Defenders duties apart from physically handling the opposition players is to prevent their goalkeeper from being intimidated by the other team. They make sure no ball is moved towards their goal in the process protect their goalkeeper. Good defenders make sure to push the opposition players back and sideways on to the edges of the field away from their goal area. Mid-field players control the flow of the game, coordinate play between their back to distribute the ball on to the forward for goal scoring. The attackers, strikers or forwards main duty is to score goals for their team as many as possible and also to intimidate the opposition players and making sure the ball is all with their team during playtime.
The quotes this week are a continuation extraction from a book which when read in full gives out some knowledge on the psychological side of leadership which often is not consciously thought of by leaders and those aspiring to be leaders. I am sure the few selected quotations listed below from this book will enlighten you to one or two life lessons, read and enjoy:
NEUROSCIENCE FOR LEADERSHIP by Tara Swart, Kitty Chisholm and Paul Brown
“Even though psychology has informed business for decades there still sometimes seems to be an assumption that there is a cut-off between mind and body, with little or no interaction between them. Since the advent of sophisticated scanning techniques, our increasing understanding that neuroscience is drifting below the neck and physiology is drifting above the neck is growing through visibility of the exquisite interaction between nerves and hormones (the neuroendocrine system) in the brain and body as a whole.”
“Experiments show that men and women can have a similar appetite for risk, but that men are more willing to act on partial information, which has obvious advantages and disadvantages.”
“Humans communicate with their whole body, with intentional as well as non-intentional movements, with stance and stillness, with both what is and what is not actioned. For example, if your boss makes eye contact with a pleasant expression when you see her in the corridor you are quite likely to interpret that as meaning that she is, if not friendly, at least not inimical. The absence of a smile, or eye contact, can be interpreted as a potential cause for apprehension. And those reactions can happen without our brain being consciously aware of what is happening and why we are feeling as we are. At levels below our conscious awareness our brain is using its automatic ability to assign intent to a whole range of signals from other people to which our conscious brain, with its limited processing capacity, does not always pay attention. ………”
“Making decisions is a complex set of processes which uses a large number of parts of our brain, and depends as much on our emotional systems, as on the workings of our pre-frontal cortex (PFC – that part of the brain significantly involved in strategic thinking and planning). These processes are not yet fully understood, but through a combination of imaging technologies such as EEG, psychological experiments and observations where illness or brain damage causes distinctive behaviour, we are beginning to understand just how challenging decision making can be for human beings.”
“If as a leader you have great ambitions and a desire not only to enable your organization to succeed but to make some contribution to your society, then taking some risk is inevitable and enabling wider learning from your mistakes essential.”
