I love my job.

I love training. I love to see the look on a participant’s face when they suddenly “get it” and learn a new concept.

I also love what I learn from my participants. I’m the trainer but I learn a lot from my participants as well.

I’ve got to share something I learned recently.

This happened while I was facilitating a two-day training on critical decision making, accountability, and how to promote healthy conflict on a team.
I was talking about how important it is to play the devil’s advocate when making a decision in order to avoid an RBD (Really Bad Decision). A participant jumped in to the discussion with a great idea:

When a team is working through a big decision, assign one person to be the Designated Devil’s Advocate. Their job is to challenge everything, think of a reason why that idea won’t work, why that decision will fail dismally.

The responsibility for the Designated Devil’s Advocate would be assigned to a different person at every meeting to avoid becoming the “Negative Ned, or Nancy.”

Then It occurred to me a team also needs a Designated Driver; one team member assigned to champion the idea on the table. Again this task would be assigned to a different person at every meeting.

Simple, but profound!

Did I tell you I love my job?

Tim Hast is a consultant at Encore Life Skills.  His mission is to develop leaders you’d want to follow and teams you’d want to join.  Tim is an Authorized Everything DiSC Partner and a Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team facilitator with Wiley.