I spent several years in S.E. Asia. One of the countries I lived in was India where my wife and I were teachers for an anglophone home-school network. We worked with children from literally all around the world. Raising a deaf son, the oldest of our our six children, we also worked as English teachers and counsellors among the Indian deaf community. Our network consisted of many people in several different cities, The worked we did was culturally sensitive and required many different skills so our teacher’s network adopted an adaptation of the ‘Teamwork’ leadership system that some of our friends had observed in Japan.
This system consisted of a leadership team of several people, each one representing a different part of the work at hand. In our case one was childcare/education, another represented the financial aspect, while another was the personal/health representative. This provided a well-balanced system where, for the most part, all aspects of a situation were reviewed before decisions were made. I remember one such a ‘teamwork’ sharing their experience working together. As the teamwork members got together to make necessary decisions for the network, they noticed that they always ran against the same dynamics. There was always one teamwork member who seemed to push on the gas pedal while the other applied the brakes. Wisdom then deferred to the third member who became the clutch helping the two others to bring the vehicle of their decision-making forward in synchronized harmony. As they kept working together, they realized that therein was the advantage of their working relationship. Yes, in any governing body, their needs to be someone with their foot on the gas so the ‘vehicle’ actually goes somewhere, but someone also with their foot on the brakes to keep it from crashing into dangerous situations. And as those who drive a stick-shift know, unless they work in concert with the clutch, the vehicle will stall. Working together with people of different temperaments and personality is actually a big part of wisdom. As I heard it said, ‘Both optimists and pessimists contribute to this world. The optimist invents the airplane, and the pessimist invents the parachute!’
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
If you appreciate these articles, support their upcoming publication in a book called, "REFLECTIONS OF A FIRE CHAPLAIN"
|