A Southern ex-boss from my high-tech marketing days (and with whom I have become good friends) used to say, “The sun doesn’t always shine on the same dog’s ass all the time.” His offbeat managerial witticisms made me laugh and they were often right. In improvisation – just as it is in the workplace – sometimes we lead and sometimes we follow. We can’t always be in the spotlight. That’s what it means to work and play in a team-based environment. One of the most important leadership skills an improviser and co-worker can develop is knowing when not to enter a ‘scene,’ or when to let other players (co-workers, etc.) take focus. To be a leader, you sometimes have to follow. Often, the greatest
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Kathy,
Thank you for such a warm yet incisive and insightful post – not an easy juggling act yet the whole is truly greater than the parts here. Would love to offer this as a guest blog post on our site sometime, given our shared value of acknowledging and nourishing the essential human element inherent in every (business) relationship. Thanks, again, for a most rewarding read today.
– Lucie
Kathy, I really like the notion of “am I needed” in meetings and leadership.
This sounds like the ongoing issue with improvisers. We can generate offers at an amazing rate and that means that we need to let go of them all the time. It doesn’t meant that those ideas/offers are not good – in fact many of them are. But, we don’t need them all and adding all of the being added make the meeting/scene less good.
Well at the risk of adding all of my potential thoughts about this, I’ll leave it at one simple one that moves the conversation forward a bit.