BY FC EXPERT BLOGGER NORMAN WOLFETue Aug 25, 2009 at 1:19 AM
This blog is written by a member of our expert blogging community and expresses that expert's views alone.
My dear friend Paul Walker just posted and interesting blog on his Huffington Post site. In it he proposes that the first thing he would do if the USA was his client is “do is a teambuilding to improve honest communication and trust.” And then goes on to say that “If we do not stop fighting each other, we will fall behind as a nation-state, just like companies whose leadership fights each other.”
Paul is a CEO Coach and works wonders with his business clients to align the teams to implement their business strategies. And in business conflict among team members is the surest way to impeded success.
The problem with associating the success parameters from business to politics is that they are not the same "game", anymore than one can play rugby by the rules of baseball.
Our government was set up to achieve certain ends; it was designed primarily for control of power. Our three divisions, executive, legislative and judiciary were purposely designed to ensure no one function could gain complete control of our nation. Checks and Balances was the designing objective.
And as for organizations who “explore ideas to find the best way instead of playing win/lose games” I have to remind you that our whole society is based on the adversarial principle (a win/lose game). Our founding fathers recognized that we were unlikely to find A Solomon the Wise to discern the truth or the best solution so they set up our system based on the idea that the truth can best be is discovered by opposing views being voiced and through the "jury of one's peers" truth would emerge. This is the basis of our legal system and it is also the foundation of our Two Party System. It was once said that the political extremes define the issues and the moderates pass the laws. We need a return of the moderates to act as “jury of one’s peers.”
The problem we have is not one of team building but organization design. We designed it to have opposing positions compete with the belief that the best solution would emerge from the conflict. We could of course redesign our system and create one that relied on the same principles of business. However business is governed as much by market forces as they are by leadership team dynamics.
Government was never designed to run efficiently, it was designed to control misuse of power and given that we are dealing with humans playing with immense powers, I am not sure I want to change the design.
I coach organizations and the CEOs who lead them. Organizations are living entities and have their own Soulful Purpose. When coaching the Organization my goal is to help it realize its unique contribution to our world. When coaching business leaders I am working within a certain Context, a certain set of objectives and governing rules. To coach political leaders as if they were business CEOs would be like coaching an artist as if she was a football player - different Context, different objective, different game.
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