Did Aristotle have Amygdala?
During the two days of life class, many topics were discussed and I could relate each one of them in some way or the other. Amygdala Hijack was one of the most famous topics, but surprisingly I couldn’t relate to it much because I had a hard time remembering when it happened to me. In our friends / colleagues circle, I even jokingly said that maybe I do not have this amygdala part in my brain at all!
The topic that I could connect the most was Google’s Project Aristotle, something which I could relate to my previous work experience before Fountainhead and was even trying to sense my current one as well.
I often believed that you need a competent team to achieve your work goals. That’s the most important ingredient, isn’t it? However, in my previous work where I led a team of 6, I was highly dissatisfied with our work and the team’s efficiency, even though I truly believed in the skills and competency of each of the team members. As a team lead, I took the blame on myself that I couldn’t guide the team in the right way and couldn’t delegate tasks efficiently.
However, the Aristotle Project gave me a new lens of looking at this situation. I analysed the situation from the 5 elements point of view. Was there psychological safety? Was there dependability? Structure and Clarity? Could they see the meaning and sense of purpose? Could they see the impact of their work? And the most important, was there free communication?
I realised that there were gaps in each of these five elements somewhere or the other. No matter how much the right skills you have, if you don’t have clarity of what exactly you have to do, you will make a blunder. And if the team does not find a safe space to talk about things, no matter how silly and stupid, it would impact the work in some way. After all, people don’t bring all the skills and competence before they join the work, they develop it during the course of the work itself. And free communication is at the heart of enabling this process, and the five elements that rests on it.
Here at fountainhead, when I see a few hurdles at working together, I can now analyse the situation from a similar lens and can better learn from my past experience using these elements. I hope this tool will help to make things better and more efficient.
P.S.: The title is just a clickbait!