Think of a Leader

As Graham was finishing his interactive presentation on what makes an efficient leader, he stared at the room and said: “As your final task, I will give you 20 seconds to think of a leader.” Easy… Or so we thought.

Harder though, to choose which one. And hardest to take Graham’s final sentence:

“How many of you thought of yourself?”

None would be an exaggeration: one shy hand was wobbling in mid-air. When asked to explain, the student said he considered himself as an option, but then rejected it. “Seeing one’s self as a leader is essential to be one” is something I said when asked to give one key quality to be a good leader. “And being self-confident,” I added.  I could sense most of my group members agreed with me. So why didn’t any of us think of ourselves as leaders?

We do not see our names in newspapers on a regular basis, CBC, CNN, or even TF1. They do not know about our existence and we do not get calls from influential political figures for advice, nor do we even have an office or a desk tag with our name on it accompanying some honorary title. We do not wear tuxedos on a regular basis. Most of us do not have the walk of Humans whose life has been filled with successes, achievements, and the yearning for more.  Yet.

But we do have experience in our own fields and stories to share.  We all participate in some kind of volunteering with a wide range of NGOs.  We have led projects and flown them to success. We have also experienced failure and learned from our mistakes. Most importantly, we dream and yearn for more achievements.

We are, in a lot of ways, similar to the people who popped up in our minds, but haven’t achieved quite as much. We are potential for leadership, but is potential enough to shout achievement?

In French, there is a saying that goes: “do not sell the bear’s skin before you’ve killed it. Do not call yourself a leader before others have called you one.

I am a leader in progress. Some people might have called me “leader” before, but I still lack a few essential skills to be a good leader: experience, knowledge, and self-confidence. A lot like most teenagers.

And in order to acquire the last-mentioned skill, I need one thing: recognition.

My question to you is this: “if I ask you to think of leaders, will some of them be the ICL Fellows?” If you answer yes and tell us that you would answer yes, then we will too.

Why You Can’t Reduce Life to a Physics Equation

Leadership was present today, maybe more than any other day in the program so far… and it hit us hard.

The concept of Day 10 was to improve our leadership skills through earning points in the morning and spending them on material buying in the afternoon, with the ultimate goal of building the sturdiest, fastest, and prettiest (or at least one of the three) boat.

I was part of team Purple.

Team Purple was (and is) comprised of a people who would most likely not have gathered around a barbecue on a Sunday lunch… or any other day for that matter. We were a bunch of people who only had in common the fact that we are all human beings. That was about it, to be honest.

We did not exactly shine in the morning. The ten of us were on a sort of race-to-power type of relationship, which didn’t prove very efficient.  A few of us weren’t particularly willing to get involved and all of us were aware of these issues.  Still, we lacked a solution.

I know this sounds like the “story of a failure in essay format,” but please bear with me because this didn’t turn out badly at all in the end.

We finished the morning session ranking last and were not particularly eager on attacking the afternoon.  However, thanks to some good souls on the team, we found the energy to run around looking for purple clothing and, along with it, some team spirit. I also spent a fair chunk of the lunch break researching cardboard boat building techniques.  None of them seemed all that appropriate though. So I figured that, just like anything else in life, physics could solve that problem.

Mistake.  BIG mistake.

My faith in physics, mathematics, and science in general is not infinite, but it’s not all too far off.  By the time our team gathered, I had Archimedes’ Principle all worked out for the boat, and was over excited at the idea of putting science in real life once again. My teammates didn’t necessarily agree with all I said at first, but when the scientific and pseudo-mathematical explanations joined in, everyone pretty much agreed to the idea I had proposed. Science does that to people: it takes over their common sense and dismisses past experiences.

The race proved that I should have listened more to the people who exhibited the two previously mentioned skills.

Being put in charge of the conception of a project is a form of leadership. Not necessarily the most visible form of leadership, but it clearly occurred to me that people were relying a lot on what I thought and wanted. It also quickly hit me that if that boat was to fail its diverse missions, I would be held responsible.  Grim perspective ahead.

However, I had faith that the boat was going to float. The basic Physics evaluation I had constructed made me believe so.

Going through the boat building process, we literally went through every single step of Tuckman’s Stages of team development: we formed in the morning, stormed around the conceptual boat discussion, normed over the cutting and taping cardboard, and performed right before the race.

Yes, before.  We performed in the sense that we overcame every single bit of adversity we had faced earlier on: our differences, our strong different characters, our independent thinking, our lack of flexibility, and our tiredness.  But not only did we overcome these obstacles, we actually made the best of them, and managed to turn those weaknesses into strengths in only a few hours.

The Purpleocity, as we had proudly named our boat, was a marvel of simplicity and theoretical efficiency: it floated perfectly, looked sturdy, and was waterproof. And in fact, everyone was quite amazed at its hydrodynamic shape considering how little resources our team could afford. I believe that we all felt very pumped and excited at the prospect of actually having a chance to win one of the contests.

Little did we know that, as soon as our pilot would step into the boat, it would become highly unstable. Sure, it could take her weight and a whole lot more, but I never considered the fact that humans move and they are not an inert mass in a boat. So what had to happen?  It happened: our boat tilted, and I will leave the rest of the story to your imagination, which might manage to figure into the abundance of emotions, ranging from despair to hilarity that went through our team as we watched our project become seafloor decoration.

But there are lessons to take from any experience and, just like our favorite storyteller would say: Good luck, bad luck, who knows?

On a team level, this was a chance for us to bond in a way that is actually quite solid. When I see one of my teammates in a corridor, I might not think “Oh, that’s a really close friend,” but I surely think “Thank you for a great experience.  Thank you for what you taught me, showed me, and told me. Thank you for the arguments — we might have disagreed, but we eventually found a compromise and understood each other. Thank you for the changes you brought to my initial boat plan: it surely would have sunk a whole lot faster without them. Thank you for listening to me and trusting that my science could be right. But ultimately, sorry for my failure at encompassing one key variable. Teamwork involves a number of complexities and nuances.  It can be hard to share leadership. But thank you for trying regardless.

My hope is that when they see me, they also have a list of “thank yous.” I believe they do Maybe they will thank me for the hugging and cheering at the end even over a sunken boat, even over crushed egos and prides.  We were still strong and true.

Day 10 was, as mentioned earlier, a chance to prove anyone who doubted it that humanity, a characteristic present in all bipeds that belongs to the Homo Sapiens Sapiens’ descent, is enough to get a bunch of people working together. And it’s enough for them to work efficiently together.  An elegy of hope for the future that I believe will be seen more and more as the participants of this Academy scatter around the world and share their trust and faith in mankind.