As an observer in of the Tinker Toy exercise, one thing stood out to me, the difference in leadership styles. This is some that I have talked about in other situations but this exercise demonstrated this clearly. Every team leader took a different approach to orchestrating the construction of the Tinker Toy building. As the ten minutes were ticking away I thought that some teams clearly had an advantage and had “figured this out”. When the ten minutes were up, I was wrong. All the teams had constructed about 80% of the building. This surprised me. As I observed, some leaders spent a lot of time organizing the pieces and clearly making a plan for the construction process. I mistakenly took these teams as being behind and not as effective. In the last few minutes however, the time spent up front to organize paid off as everything started to fall in place. These teams quickly caught up. The other teams that had started off fast slowed down or “hit a wall” because they had not thought through the entire process. Congratulations to all the teams for very successfully demonstrating that a diverse range of leadership styles can be equally effective.
