Teaching vs. doing

Kids are constantly learning new stuff. For example, to tie their shoelaces. We don’t always have the time or the patience to show them how to do it. Do we invest (teach)? or do we want inmediate results (do)?

  • We can teach them how to tie their shoelaces (wetrain them) or you can just tie them ourselves every time
  • We can train and then let them try over and over again, learning from experience or we can just do it and never allow them to learn during the process
  • We can educate them in research (while investigating how things work) or we can let them think that only we have the answer
  • We can show them that there is learning from failure or we can tell them that failure is not an option
  • We can enable them to understand the effort tha lies behind every success or we can leave them blind and think that everything in life is easy, that you only need to ask
  • We can help them to walk the road towards thinking by themselves or we can let them come to us every time that difficult questions appear
  • We can support them so they build their own opinion or we can just let them go with what we consider it’s the truth/right thing
  • We can obtain self-reliant/confident kids or we can have kids that will always ask us what to do next

Teaching takes time, requires dedication, patience, support. And, usually, results do not come inmediately, and when they do, they might need some corrections.

Doing has inmediate results, we do not need to correct anything. Simple and fast.

What kind of kids do you want to lead the future?

But is that what we want? Or do we prefer to develop our kids, our teams?

Giver or taker, which one are you?

In the previous post Explanations, motives and timing. Actions talk about us, we took a look at the «Why, When and How»  that defines our truly personality. In today’s post I would like to elaborate a bit more on the Why, on its impact on us and what surrounds us (colleagues, organizations, society). As an essential ingredient of that «The Why» we see two different kinds of people:

Takers: Who are self-servers in there interactions: What can you do for me?

Givers: Most of their actions are based on a What can I do for you?

So, givers, they take the worst part in the P2P business of interaction between givers and takers. They put a lot of effort. They spend a lot of time trying to improve the team at a high cost for them. Bad for them, good for their organization. They are the key stone for team building, for collaboration and great motivators. But, be careful and remember that they need to be handled with care mainly when they are surrounded by Takers, because we can lose them. They can get frustrated.

We dedicate a lot of time and energy to our organization, there is a lot of us on their success or failure, on the speed of change, … And because we never leave a 100% our personal life out of the workplace neither who we are (behavior=our moral compass + our mood + background + a response to others actions + many other things) we can not afford loosing givers on the way.

Adam talks about 3 possible ways that will create a «net» of successful givers:

  1. Protect them from burnout
  2. Encourage help-seeking
  3. Keep the wrong people off the bus

I highly recommend you watching this TED Talk by Adam Grant, enjoy it.