My (very gracious) hosts and I just finished watching season 1 of Gold Rush Alaska in an attempt to get some of our group caught up to season 2.
Watching the season a second (or even third) time, combined with my most-recent experience with a new team at work, got me thinking about how teams need good leadership. It’s not enough to be a good team. A good team must have proper, well-defined goals, and they must have work habits that help achieve those goals. The team’s goals (and results) must be quantifiable.
The Gold Rush guys were a good team in the sense that they operated as a unit. They cooperated relatively well in most tasks—including ganging up on Dorsey. They were relatively friendly with each other, they protected their group goals (against perceived threats like Dakota Fred), and they actually managed jolts to their system well. Their team was extremely resilient to a perpetual string of failure. (Many businesses wish they had this sort of resiliency.) Yet, they produced very little gold over all.
Inducing cooperation among a group of people is a challenging task. Sure, sometimes it happens naturally, but that’s usually not the case within our business teams. Any leader assigned the task of accomplishing a goal with a group of people would be happy to have the Gold Rush team.
But the team lacked leadership. Good leadership would be responsible for providing a clear goal. How much gold were the miners supposed to produce? Who measured interim results and helped the team focus and realign with each failure?
