By Lori Lawson
Last week (or perhaps this week) one of my peers posted a blog entry entitled Learning or Getting Good Grades?. While the author may not have realized their connection to our weekly discussion, I immediately knew the importance of this post. During our last meeting, we discussed whether it is more important to have a group that works well together but does not necessarily achieve the original goal or a group that gets the job done. While I can’t remember the names for each side of this issue, I do know that it is a highly relevant topic for anyone in charge of a group (whether implicitly or explicitly), and is particularly important in the realm of community engagement.
If you recall the post mentioned above, you know that it is about learning versus getting good grades. While the author was able to get satisfactory grades based mostly off of short-term memory, their father always questioned whether they were truly learning. Of course, applied to this concept of leadership the “getting good grades” is equivalent to getting the job done, while learning is equivalent to the group that learns to and continues to function well together. In this case, which is more valuable?
Group Relations versus Achieving a Goal
The author seems to indicate learning as more important, but does this translate well into leadership? My first reaction was no. Leadership is about getting the job done. Think of a service project – does it do any good for the community for the volunteers to make new friends or is it better for them to establish enough of a working relationship to get the job done? Clearly the second option provides the greatest benefit to the community versus personal gain.
What made me stop and think is this comparison to learning. Isn’t it important for members of a group to learn how to work together instead of potentially being inefficient in order to hurry up and get the task done? This post made me realize that yes, learning how to work well with others is an important skill in leadership that cannot simply be overlooked when a goal is in sight.
Why not learn and make good grades?
I suppose my solution (a middle-of-the-road approach, if you will) involves a bit of a learning curve. If a group is being established for a series of goals involving a long-term commitment, perhaps there is value in allowing the group time to discover how they best work together with the goal somewhat irrelevant. Of course, there is a time where this simply becomes frivolous, which means a switch to goal-oriented work would be in order.
Back to the learning and good grades comparison, it is clear to see how one leads to the other. If you put the time and effort into learning the material, you will inevitably get higher grades. The same is true when it comes to working in a group and directing a group as a leader: take the time to learn about one another and have a higher degree of success.
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