Imagine your boss asks you to work on a design for a new product your company is soon launching. He gives you a time frame for completion and some guidelines. He also tells you that he is not available to help but you can check in with him from time to time to let him know how it’s going. And, on a certain date he’ll want to see what you come up with.
Now, imagine you begin this task and soon discover you need a team to help you because you have a few ideas but you need more, and you feel stuck. You then ask several members in your department to work with you on this project. Before long you and your team have come up with something you think meets the criteria and you are excited about sharing it with your boss. You’ve even worked on this project outside of normal working hours because you all had other work to do and didn’t want to get behind in that during this project.
When the time comes to show your boss the new design he…
(Scenario 1)… looks at the design, listens to how you and your team have developed it, is impressed and congratulates you and your team on your design, which is still a work in progress. He gives you more goals and guidelines and asks that you and your team continue with your collaborative work toward making the intended product. He doesn’t expect you to work overtime on this, but just during the workday. He is excited about the design realizing it is very forward thinking and may even help the company make a name for itself.
(Scenario 2)…looks at the design, listens to how you and your team have developed it, is impressed by it but scolds you for gathering a team to help you work on the project. He says he had asked YOU to do it and if he had wanted a team to do it he would have told you that from the start. Even though the design meets all the criteria, and the product will make a name for the company, he lowers your pay for that week and tells you not to work collaboratively again unless he asks you to.
I’ve heard from many parents who share stories like this with me, but the scenario is school, not the business world. Their son or daughter was caught “cheating” because they chose to work on an assignment or project with a group of kids instead of doing it alone. When the time comes to turn in the assignment, all students who worked together have the same answers so the teacher gives each one of them a failing grade for that assignment or project. Even when the students ask the teacher to quiz them verbally to see if they know the material, the teacher refuses and calls them dishonest.
I’m pretty certain that Scenario 2 (above) doesn’t happen very often (if ever!) in the business world. Yet Scenario 2 (substituting student for employee and teacher for boss) happens on a regular basis in classrooms across the country.
I posted a blog entry about “The Global Achievement Gap” by Tony Wagner a while ago. You can read it here.
Tony Wagner highlights what business people say about new employees:
(26) Kids just out of school have an amazing lack of preparedness in general leadership skills and collaborative skills…They lack the ability to influence versus direct command…the only kind of leadership young people have…is one that relies on obedience versus the kind…demanded by…teams and networks.
If you run into a situation with your son or daughter where they have been accused of cheating when they were working in a group, I suggest you give his or her teacher a copy of this book. I also suggest you have a polite but firm conversation with the teacher to explain that it’s more important for your child to be creative and collaborative in doing assignments than it is for him to get a certain grade. We are so focused on grades and competition in the classroom that anything creative or collaborative looks like cheating.
As Ken Robinson says, “We’ve been told for 10 years in school there is one answer, and it’s in the back of the book, and don’t copy, that’s cheating. Outside of school, cheating is called collaborating.”
Any thoughts?
