Collaborative Leadership Lessons from Chinese Checkers
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Several years ago, we were on vacation at a bed and breakfast. They had a small game room and one of the games they had was Chinese checkers. I hadn’t seen that game in years. When I was a child, I used to love playing Chinese Checkers. I wasn’t a big fan of chess. I never really figured out why until I was an adult and once I did, it helped shape my views on leadership. This learning is what I would like to share with you today.
Collaborative leadership is like Chinese checkers.
Command and control leadership is like chess.
In the current world we live in, command and control leadership is limited in its effectiveness. The U.S. military recognized this awhile ago. Their transformation began after 9/11 as General Stanley McCrystal describes in his excellent book, Team of Teams. According to Gallup, only 32% of employees are engaged at work. Resenteeism is on the rise.To be successful, we need to learn collaborative leadership skills.
The objective of chess is to capture your opponent’s king and to do that many other chess pieces are destroyed in the process. The objective of Chinese checkers is to get all ten of your pieces to the other side of the board.
For those of you that may not be familiar with Chinese checkers, it can be played with 2-6 players. Unlike its name, the game originated in Germany. The board looks like a star of David. Each player has ten marbles in each corner of the star. The objective of the game is to move all your marble pieces to the corner opposite of your board by “hopping” across other pieces. You are allowed to hop over your own pieces or your opponent’s pieces to get to the other side. Unlike chess, all the pieces always remain on the board.
What can Chinese checkers teach us about Leadership?
So, what are some of the collaborative leadership lessons we can learn from Chinese checkers?
- All team members must get to the other side for the team to be successful.
- The weakest team member (last to reach the other side) will determine whether you succeed.
- The goal is not to destroy the competitor, the objective is speed – how quickly can you reach your goals?
- To do this you need to leverage your team as well as missteps from your competitors.
- If your team members don’t work together and collaborate, you will not be able to reach the other side in time to win.
With chess, no matter how complicated the strategy may seem, at the end of the day it is about destroying your competitor by giving up our pieces in the process. We should not go into our leadership roles with that mindset. It will destroy our teams.
And in real life, unlike chess, as a leader you are typically not facing just one challenger or competitor. In business, like Chinese checkers, you have multiple competitors. The middle of the board can get crowded, and you can either use your competitors moves to your advance or disadvantage. If they make a misstep, you can hop over their piece and that will get you closer to your goal.
Sometime before that trip I had been part of a project management training program. In one of the exercises, we were divided into two teams. All the team members on each team were blindfolded and each team was given a rope. We had to arrange the rope in the shape of a square. At the end of the exercise, we got to watch the video of ourselves as well as the other team. The other team had an appointed leader and their strategy reminded me of chess. The other team members stood in place as the leader moved them into position. Our team finished before theirs and as we watched them complete their exercise, we saw that there was one other person on that team that did not seem to agree with their strategy as he called out other suggestions on what they could do. When they completed the exercise, what was most noticeable was the difference in energy between our team and theirs. When our team finished, we were cheering and giving each other high fives. When their team finished, the team members just all walked away and one of them even commented that their square did not look like a square (one side was slanted).
As leaders, we do ourselves and our organizations a disservice with command-and-control leadership. We want our teams to help each other, “hopping” over other team members to get to the other side instead of waiting to be moved by their leader. This will get us to our goal much more quickly.
The other important lesson is that the last piece to reach the other side (weakest part of your team) is what determines your victory. Imagine if the marble pieces were team members and one marble piece refused to work with the other ones and wanted to cross the board on their own. That would certainly slow you down!
Becoming a More Collaborative Leader
So, what are some ways you can become a more collaborative leader?
- Give team members clear direction of what the goal is but provide them with as much freedom as the situation allows to adapt how they accomplish this goal. The board is constantly changing.
- Align performance incentives so that they encourage team members to help each other out – “hop” over each other vs. competing against each other.
- Replace team members that don’t work well with others. If he/she is not open to changing their behavior, then you need to find a different team member because he/she is holding your whole team back.
- Understand the strengths and weaknesses of your team. Your role as a leader is to give them positions where they can be most effective. People are different, collaboration leverages those differences to accomplish more together.
- Play or learn to play Chinese checkers!
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