The best leadership advice from Nobel prize winner Richard Feynman
Context is everything.
In his Hilarious Autobiography “surely you’re joking Mr. Feynman”, Nobel prize winner Richard Feynman tells a story that is actually one of the best advice I have ever heard about leadership and people.
During his time at Los Alamos (working on the Atom Bomb), he led a group of brilliant high school children that were cherry-picked from across the country in order to assist with operating the new IBM machines that were used to solve problems.
Before he took over, their throughput was such that they solved 3 problems in 9 months. This could very well be explained by the nature of the manual work that had to go into operating the machines, as well as the complexity of calculations.
However, Feynman had a different explanation: lack of context.
It turns out that no one had told the kids what is it that they are calculating or what is the purpose of the project. They didn’t understand that high number meant more energy and low number meant less. They didn’t have the motivation to work very hard because they did not understand how critical their effort is, in the race to develop “the bomb”.
So Feynman sat them down, explained the whole story: what is it that they are building, what are the numbers that they are calculating etc.
In the next 3 months they solved 9 problems (almost X10 output).
People will always surprise you. They will have ideas and they will work harder than you ever imagined if they just have the sense of purpose and understand the context. I’ve never seen a great leader that holds back on information from her people and I’ve seen countless examples for the opposite.
Share as much information as possible, take time to explain and give the context, people will be happy and follow.
