Page 133 - leadership-experience-2008

CikguOnline
CikguOnline
114 PART 3: THE PERSONAL SIDE OF LEADERSHIP

IN THE LEAD IN THE LEAD Kevin Kelly, Emerald Packaging
As the top leader of his family’s California company, Emerald Packaging—a maker
of plastic bags for the food industry, Kevin Kelly thought of himself as on top of his
game, chief architect of the company’s growing sales and profi ts. When Emerald
began to falter, Kelly blamed it on his managers’ resistance to new ideas that could
keep the business thriving. He thought everyone needed to change except him.
For some time, Kelly’s leadership approach was to reprimand and complain,
then let the matter drop, only to reprimand and complain again a few weeks or
months later. Then, Kelly decided to look at things in a different way. Was it re-
ally all his managers’ fault? Maybe there were other factors besides their personal
shortcomings that were to blame. Realizing that everyone was under stress from
several years of rapid growth, Kelly decided to hire a pack of new, young manag-
ers to reinforce his exhausted troops. Surprisingly, though, things just seem to get
worse, with the new managers feeling adrift and the old-timers seeming even less
focused than before. Then Kelly had to face an even harder truth: rather than being
the one person in the organization who didn’t need to change, as Kelly had previ-
ously thought, he realized he was a big part of the problem.
The idea both unnerved and excited him as Kelly realized that he needed to
remake himself, becoming a mentor who could shape positive attitudes in others
and knit the newcomers and long-time employees into a cohesive and productive
team. Kelly sought out consultants and classes to help boost his people skills and
began taking a more interested and understanding role in the problems his veteran
managers had been facing on a daily basis. He began meeing regularly with the new
hires as well, rather than expecting other managers to do all the work of integrat-
ing them into the team. By examining his attributions and shifting his perception of
himself, the organizational situation, and his managers’ abilities, Kelly made changes
that successfully united the two groups into a cohesive team. 30

Cognitive Differences

Cognitive style
Cognitive style The fi nal area of individual differences we will explore is cognitive style. Cognitive
how a person perceives, style refers to how a person perceives, processes, interprets, and uses informa-
how a person perceives,
processes, interprets, and uses tion. Thus, when we talk about cognitive differences, we are referring to varying
processes, interprets, and uses
information
information
approaches to perceiving and assimilating data, making decisions, solving prob-
lems, and relating to others. Cognitive approaches are preferences that are not
31
necessarily rigid, but most people tend to have only a few preferred habits of
thought. One of the most widely recognized cognitive differences is between what
we call left-brained versus right-brained thinking patterns.
Patterns of Thinking and Brain Dominance
Neurologists and psychologists have long known that the brain has two distinct
hemispheres. Furthermore, science has shown that the left hemisphere controls
movement on the body’s right side and the right hemisphere controls movement
on the left. In the 1960s and 1970s, scientists also discovered that the distinct

hemispheres influence thinking, which led to an interest in what has been called
left-brained versus right-brained thinking patterns. The left hemisphere is associ-
ated with logical, analytical thinking and a linear approach to problem-solving,
whereas the right hemisphere is associated with creative, intuitive, values-based
32
thought processes. A recent JC Penney television commercial provides a simple
illustration. The commercial shows a woman whose right brain is telling her to go
out and spend money to buy fun clothes, while the left brain is telling her to be