Leadership or Facilitation: funny video clip from Red Dwarf
Stumble It!At certain times a team leader needs to facilitate rather than direct. However when a leader acts too much as a facilitator or a facilitator starts to try to lead a team you get problems. Enjoy what happens when the Red Dwarf crew get themselves in a real mess over this point.
When the Red Dwarf crew have all their negative emotions sucked out by an alien poor old Rimmer loses his anger and turns into a "facilitative leader".
But does Rimmer win the support of the team for his proposed solutions to the crisis at hand?
How does a team leader judge when facilitation is required rather than direction?
Which member of the Red Dwarf crew shows most leadership in this clip?
Watch the clip Red Dwarf: The Meeting
The defining difference between Leadership and Facilitation is really the difference between (detached) involvement and (active) commitment.
My favourite illustration of this difference is the role of the pig and the chicken in delivering the bacon and eggs for your breakfast - the chicken is involved but the pig is committed.
Further Reading
Collective stupidity and the madness of crowds
Leadership under pressure: the two worst mistakes
About Ken Thompson
Ken Thompson is an expert practitioner in the area of bioteaming, swarming, virtual enterprise networks, virtual professional communities and virtual teams and has published two landmark books:
Bioteams: High Performance Teams Based on Nature's Best Designs
The Networked Enterprise: Competing for the future through Virtual Enterprise Networks
Ken writes the highly popular bioteams blog which has over 500 articles on all aspects of bioteams (aka organizational biomimicry) - in other words how human groups can learn from nature's best teams.
Ken is also founder of an exciting European technology company Swarmteams which provides unique patent-pending bioteaming technologies for all shapes and sizes of groups, social networks, business clusters, virtual/mobile communities and enterprises. Swarmteams enables groups to be more responsive and agile by fully integrating their mobile phones and the web with bioteam working techniques. The latest Swarmteams implementation is SwarmTribes which helps musicians and bands form a unique collaboration with their fans for mutual benefit.
Tags: facilitation, leadership, videos
Digg | 
del.icio.us | 
Reddit | 
Yahoo! | 
Add to my favourites
Comments
Deep!
Posted by: Jo | September 30, 2008 10:48 AM
Bioteams Books Reviews
Leadership under pressure: the two worst mistakes
I have been thinking a lot about what happens when a leader gets under severe pressure, usually because things are not going according to plan. It seems to me this is the very essence of real leadership and where leaders can really justify their salaries. BUT according to Professor Dietrich Dorner, in his excellent book The Logic Of Failure: Recognizing And Avoiding Error In Complex Situations, there are two very tempting but ultimately disastrous tangents a leader can pursue in a crisis instead of addressing the real issues.
Buy it now from:
Amazon.Com
Amazon.Co.UK
Related Team Leadership Development Articles
Organizational teams: the three basic types
One of the most important team questions, often ignored when a traditional or virtual team is setup, is What type of team are we actually dealing with here?
Can a team have just one member
The best team is Me. It might sound like heresy but sometimes the most effective way to produce something is not through collaboration but by just doing it yourself.
Leadership or Facilitation: funny video clip from Red Dwarf
At certain times a team leader needs to facilitate rather than direct. However when a leader acts too much as a facilitator or a facilitator starts to try to lead a team you get problems. Enjoy what happens when the Red Dwarf crew get themselves in a real mess over this point.
