Leaders are often showcased as those who sit in the corner office, who take high risk decisions in the boardrooms and those who speak about the achievements of the company from a podium. But real leadership is much more democratic. It is shown by each and every member of the company in the decisions each of them take every day and the integrity they show towards the values and goals of the organisation. Leadership at the top may set the vision, but leadership on the ground determines whether that vision becomes reality or fades into a PowerPoint deck.
Every company is like a ship. Though it is the captain who is at the helm, the very survival of the ship and its ability to reach its destination is based on the ability of each and every crew member to play their part and take accountability for how their actions influence the end goal. Leadership is about taking responsibility and influencing outcomes by caring about the whole and not just your part. It’s about reacting to a problem or situation regardless of whether it is part of your job description.
Ever since I became part of T4D, one aspect of daily work life that has stood out for me is the level of agency that each and every member of the team has, not only in their own immediate deliverables, but also in driving the organisation forward.
As a way of celebrating the innate leadership within the T4D team as well as to encourage and foster it even more across the team, it was decided to have a gamification exercise focused on leadership as part of the team building activities during the T4D sprint at Khopoli.
The objective of the exercise was to simulate real life situations that might be in dissonance with the values and goals of the organisations and to challenge each and every team member to don the leadership hat and take a crack at how they would go about reacting to these scenarios. The objective was also to give the team a general sense of the friction among goals, values and challenges that may be invisible to teams but is a regular feature of the day to day job of running the company. The game was designed for each of the scenarios to be exposed over time with the teams getting a fixed amount of time to decide on any one of the four options given for each scenario.
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The scenarios were designed to be spread across various aspects of the organisation straddling strategy, operations, administration and innovation.
“Dogfooding” at its best, the entire gamification was run through Glific as was the case with the entire sprint itself with each of the team captains having to enter in their choice as well as rationale through Whatsapp.
The design of the gamification session was entirely dependent on the participants connecting to the concept and outcome of the game and it was such a rewarding experience to see the energy and interest of each and every team member to ideate, deliberate and decide on the course of action on each of the scenarios.
The time duration of 12 minutes between scenarios was filled with decision making styles of many types; intense brooding, animated deliberation, banter and laughter that seemed to pay homage to the innumerable methods of being a successful leader.
The game also gave the entire team a chance to see how members within the same organisation reacted differently to different scenarios and to see areas where there was complete resonance as well as dissonance across the organisation.
Voting Patterns across the teams
It was also very interesting to note that teams that had selected the same option for some of the scenarios had completely different rationales as to why they chose their respective option !
One of the main objectives of the gamified session was to give each and every team member a sense of the gears at work behind each and every decision taken at the top.
The level of engagement and the quality of the conversations, ideas and pushbacks encountered are testimony to the leadership potential across the team and I am confident that it will continue to come forth to drive the company forward.
When everyone shows up with a sense of ownership, the organization becomes more resilient, innovative, and trustworthy and there was sufficient evidence from the session to believe that T4D is on the right track and in safe hands !
