What greater accomplishment is there than the organization running well without you? It means you picked great people, prepared them and inspired them. And if executives did this, the world would be a better place. – Guy Kawasaki, quoted in “The Corner Office” Feature in The New York Times, March 19, 2010.
I love this quote from Guy Kawasaki, management guru and co-founder of the Alltop news aggregation, purely because it goes against your first instincts…Everyone, no matter if you are just beginning your career or have risen to the top, is focused on being indispensable – what is it that you bring that nobody else can match, and how does that translate into what you do for your organization? In this reversal, Kawasaki points to the importance of ensuring that you are dispensable. Because by being dispensable, it means you’ve hired the right kind of people to ensure that the organization stays strong.
According to Kawasaki, it still comes back to knowing your strengths and ensuring you have others around you to deal with the challenges and issues that you can’t do as well. That’s where cognitive diversity comes into play – you can’t be completely dispensable with clones of yourself running the show. Kawasaki points to the example of a high-tech company run by engineers…even though those competencies (engineering and technology) are the core element of the business…those leaders don’t have the capabilities in marketing, HR, sales, etc. And…even more so, they don’t have the thinking styles that the experts they’ve hired in those disciplines take.
It is cognitive diversity—and that equates to success for their business and dispensability at a leadership level.
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2 comments:
Another way this could be said is "working myself out of a job". This means bringing into the team those that are better than myself, if not, the team can only be as good as I will ever be. That's also the synergy of collaboration.
Looking at this from the angle of preferences seems to add a different dimension though. Is it the same seeing another with strengths different from mine, and seeing another as better than me?
Hmm - That is an interesting perspective Momo. The idea of utilizing cognitive diversity is a positive one (and one that has been proven time and time again), although I don't necessarily think that this means that one style is better or worse than another. If anything, I would take this as another example of thinking about the importance of finding different strengths (whether in actual skills or in preferences) to make a team/organization even stronger.
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