Playful leadership: The fun way to effectiveness
As a brand new parent, and a scientist at heart, I have spent the past year avidly reading parenting books, browsing parenting fora and, in general, diving into all parenting sources man has invented. During this exercise, I have come across a fantastic book titled "Playful Parenting" by Lawrence Cohen. In the author's words:
Playful Parenting means joining children in their world of play, focusing on connection and confidence, giggling and roughhousing, and following your child's lead.
This book beautifully advocates playfulness as a way to approach our children, make less and less use of our parenting authority, help children resolve their own internal conflicts and lead them to the desired behaviours. At the same time, the parent has the unique opportunity to re-discover his long forgotten playfulness and have sheer fun!
As a management consultant, I could not help myself from drawing analogies to the management practices. One of the leadership types, considered an anathema for most managers, is the "paternalistic leader"; a paternalistic leader is typically a strong Type-A male that tightly controls and manages his team, "protecting" them from the outside world while, at the same time, expecting blind obedience and full conformity to his line of thinking.
So, how can this dystopian paternalistic leader turn into a utopian playful leader?
- Join our teams in play: Any team, and especially those that handle stressful projects, need a time-out, a clear outlet to dissipate heat and tension. In many organisational settings, these time-outs are pre-designed as "team bonding events", "team outings" and other formal occasions. We can however embed these moments of playfulness and relaxation into our everyday practice, making much more powerful use of them.
Arrange morning coffees with the team outside the office premises, have lunch in nice places, chat about your weekends, share a joke as often as you can - encourage a playful, albeit professional, environment.
- Care about the team: A playful leader truly cares about his team both as professionals and, most importantly, as human beings. The paternalistic principle of "taking care of our team" can foster trust and smooth out sources of conflict within a team.
- Give them a safe space to experiment: The same way toddlers need a safe space to play and experiment with the world, so do our teams. In order for each individual to build on his or her skills and to develop a healthy self-confidence, the leader needs to provide plenty of opportunities for "getting out of the comfort zone" as well as enough tolerance to failure and encouragement for taking calculated risks.
- Re-discover your own playfulness: The key ingredient to building a playful environment is for the leader to re-discover his own playfulness. Managing a team usually imposes an automatic premium on self-importance and on taking ourselves way too seriously. Therefore, a first step is to lighten up, allow space and time for being more silly than usual, take ourselves far less seriously than we do.
It is a common misconception that being more relaxed with your team will lead to internal anarchy, chaos, inefficiency and, potentially, the end of civilisation as we know it!
Well, it's not true. From my experience, our most successful projects where we did fantastic work that our client really loved, were projects performed with great teammates, in exotic cities and with our memories stamped with jokes, great dinners and the occasional drinks. So, when in doubt, lighten up!
Akis Tsekouras is the managing director of Simulen, a consulting firm that helps companies around the world succeed.