More Than One Dimension
For thinking about the group to be effective, it has to operate in at least three dimensions. First, one must think about the group as an entity. A group of people is a different entity than the individuals. It’s made up of the humans in it, but it functions under different laws than individuals do. We’ve learned something about this; we’ve learned how to run a good meeting, how to have a good discussion, how to see that everybody talks. We’ve learned to use working consensus instead of parliamentary law. There is more to learn, of course. The group as a group needs to be thought about.
Second, the individual people in the group need to be thought about. In an RC group, in particular, but probably in any group, each individual member needs to be seen individually for who that person is, where they are battling to re-emerge, what assistance is needed.
Third, both the group and the individuals need to be thought about not just now, at this moment, but in a time sense—where they’re coming from, what point they’re at, the next move they need to make, how they need to be assisted to move in the desired direction.
Good leaders sometimes function this way intuitively, but it helps to be clearly aware of the need. If one uses a checklist of these principles to guide one’s thinking as a leader, one can practically guarantee that a group can function well.
From pages 271 to 272 of “The Nature of Leadership” in The Benign Reality
(Present Time 201, October 2020)