by Michael Holland
The interesting thing about people coming together in organizations is that they tend to create a mini-society and this society will have its own personality, rules, values and behaviors. Leaders may tend to underestimate the ingrained culture within these mini-societies and overestimate their ability to change these mini-societies with simple commands, just-in-time leadership and because they said so (always a great leadership approach.)
Consider adjusting your leadership perspective, taking on a temporary role of archaeologist. The discipline of archaeology involves surveyance, excavation and eventually analysis of data collected to learn more about past human activity. In broad scope, archaeology relies on cross-disciplinary research, drawing upon anthropology, history, art history, classics, ethnology, geography, geology, linguistics, semiology, physics, information sciences, chemistry, statistics, paleoecology, paleontology, paleozoology, paleoethnobotany, and paleobotany. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeology)
Learning more about your employees and their culture may just help you learn more about your leadership capability.
