Good morning, I hope this edition of Leadership Notes finds you well. I’ve been sent in a number of different directions on the web this past week, doing research for various projects. The first is Stanford University where they’ve been researching the neurological effects and implications of compassion and altruism http://www.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Ffeed%2FUCzno-z2lWDjrjU9J3Xd-L3Q&h=OAQE_kjPV . And a musician friend sent me to this amazing clip http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqFc4wriBvE I invite you to have a look at the second link, it’s much shorter (about 4 minutes) and makes the point nicely. The first link is to a collection of clips of academics and researchers that I’m going through slowly in the evening. In a nut shell, the research at Stanford is saying that as a species, we are hard wired to care, to be engaged with each other, to work together as opposed to against each other; co-operation is the key to our survival and not competition. And that of course shows up in the fascinating video of the metronomes in the second link. Have a look; and what you’ll see is 32 metronomes starting at different times and therefore not in ‘sync’ and fairly quickly they begin to move in ‘sync’ with each other.

Now obviously humans are not machines; and yet there appears to be a huge natural push towards synchronization. And from a leadership perspective we might then ask, where is my team at its most synchronized and where are we not. My own sense is that being out of “sync” may not be bad, it is likely part of the journey. And we appear to be hard wired towards some sort of synchronization, each of us doing what we do well, working towards a common goal. What we might need to watch for are people who don’t in fact want to play in our orchestra and rather than trying to bend over backwards to keep them in tune, we ask them to find another orchestra.

May this week find some synchronicity with our teams.