Prototypes and Role Models (Part 1 of 2)

#SunilFridayThought #FridayThought 101

"There is no one that comes to mind", the manager said. He was frustrated. I kept quiet. That was part of the process.

I said "Well, give some more thought. Someone junior to you or your peer or someone who you professionally know well will also do. You can think aloud if you prefer."

He thought for a moment. Still he could not come up with a name. He was talking as he was thinking. He said and discarded a few names. Finally, after struggling for a few minutes he came up with no name! In his coaching session I was requesting him to think of role model for a specific attributes of interest and he was struggling to find a name.

After probing a little further, we stumbled upon the problem. As he was looking for a role model, he was looking for a person who was "ideal" in all aspects of life, not just in the characteristic that we were talking about.

If you were to make a prototype to model liquid flows and make sure it represents all scale down static, dynamic and dimesionless numbers (such as Reynolds number - for those more interested) it may be quite challenging task. However, if you were to make sure the model that you create represents "relevant" and "the portion you are interested in" very well then problem is much easier. Similarly, the role model you select for "Communication skills" may not be the best person who does delegation very well.

He thought for a moment. Being engineering oriented person, my example helped him more than I thought. He himself came up with many names for attributes that he wanted to excel. While selecting a role model; people tend to forget that they are looking a for a role model for only certain aspects of life and not the entire life as a whole.

In the next part we will see why is it important to have a role model for sttributes that you want to improve upon.

What's your view? Do you agree? Do share you thoughts!

Sunil Bhave has written over 100 interesting articles and many interesting posts, several of them before starting Friday Thought series. Read Sunil's previous articles and posts. Sunil is an international certified executive coach and certified transformational leadership coach with vast industry experience, Business and Strategy Consultant, Management Development Professional with specialization on creativity, innovation and transformations. He regularly conducts workshops and speaks at many forums.

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