support without challenge can make you fat
Author: Nicky J. Davies |
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Categories: Business Fast Track
In 2008 I remember watching a film called Wall-E and being absolutely horrified.
It was based in the distant future where Wall-E is a small waste collecting robot looking after the Earth after all the human beings evacuated what was now an unsafe planet. Wall-E meets another robot called Eve, programmed to detect life on earth. When Eve finds a living plant a spaceship comes down to pick her up, Wall-E sneaks on board and ends up going into space with Eve.
At this point in the film we discover where all the human beings live that had been evacuated from the planet. They've been living this life for decades, generation after generation, with everything taken care of for them. They spend their days floating around on what look like giant inflatable rings that move their bodies, so they don't even have to walk. Food is taken care of, shelter’s taking care of, every kind of need that you can think of is taken care of for them. Basically, every human had evolved into a 'fat, dumb and happy' being.
I was shocked as it highlighted for me where we are heading if we're not careful. This is what happens when we live in a society – or are part of a team – where we have plenty of support, but no challenge.
Too much support makes you fat!
If there is no competition, no reason to strive to do better, no drive to test limits, why bother?
That's not living. That's merely existing.
But if we go too far in the opposite direction of much more challenge than support, that can make us skinny and merely exist too.
So there needs to be a balance, and nature knows how to provide this balance, if we are willing to listen to our intuition and see the balance.
Teams that perform really well do so because they have created an environment where they feel supported in looking at things from different perspectives, experimenting with different ideas. As Einstein says "we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them".
That takes a balance of support and challenge.
Research from McKinsey has show that to get that what works best is leadership that demonstrates a supportive, consultative approach at the beginning, then moves more into challenging their team members.
Challenge doesn't have to be aggressive in any way. But asking the right questions, and getting people to think think beyond their assumptions is incredibly important in developing ability, flexibility and agility.
A culture of combined support and challenge looks for the opportunities within the challenges and actually strengthens both the team and the organisation at the same time.
Human beings are naturally adaptable, resilient and agile. But sometimes we get a little bit ‘fat, dumb and happy’! We get comfortable where we are, and often we will find that life gives us a bit of a wake up call to challenge us.
Maybe the pandemic and lockdowns has been one of these wake up calls for you? Maybe we needed the challenge to get us moving forward and really seeing what we're capable of. Because it's when we're we're down and out, when we're having the biggest of challenges in our lives, that our potential really comes to the fore.
You have so much potential, so much to bring to the world. I wonder, are you just scratching the surface of your potential right now?
What would your life look like if you took on a new challenge, one that fits with what is uniquely important to you; your purpose?
And if you would like some help I would love to oblige. But don't expect lots of support without challenge!