Square Windows Are Deadly

Every single day my work is a little different. I may start the week with a college athletic team, then facilitate a Zoom session with leaders in the biomedical space, later shift to an online group coaching session comprised of individuals from all industries, and finally close the week leading educators in a face-to-face session on personal growth. While the participants may vary, there are some themes that often come up in these sessions.

One insight that I commonly share is that leadership is contextual. In other words, what works in one situation will not work in every situation. For example, we should consider a leader’s strengths and weaknesses, the needs of the people, as well as budget, timeline, culture, and desired outcomes. The contextual factor makes leadership both complex and exciting.

Take a moment and think about what a modern airplane looks like. The odds are high that you pictured the cockpit, the wings, and a long row of rounded windows. But did you know that airplanes used to have square windows?

Unfortunately, it took some tragedies to realize that square windows – the norm in western architecture – are dangerous in modern airplanes. In the mid-1950’s commercial airplanes literally started to fall apart mid-flight. As engineers studied this issue, they discovered the square windows were the source of the problem. As airplanes became bigger, weighed more, and flew faster, the corners of the square windows became a failure point. The remedy was to install rounded windows which distributed the pressure more evenly.

In our homes and places of business, square windows are safe, but on an airplane, they can be catastrophic. What is normal in one place is life-threatening in another.

This process of assessing a problem requires leaders to be able to solve the right problem and understanding context is a critical component. Solving the wrong problem only creates more problems. It would have been easy to assume the issue was the weight of the plane or how high they were trying to fly. Additionally, people might have made definitive statements like, “See, clearly humans weren’t meant to fly!” But the reality was the shape of the windows needed to be adjusted.

Contextualization forces leaders to embrace innovation. What worked when you were moving at a slower pace or working on a smaller scale might become a future failure point. Square windows on airplanes worked until they didn’t. As leaders, we must recognize how the growth of a team or an organization will require future change. The safety and success of those who are following us depends on our ability to lead change and potentially move away from what we used to do.

But change is often met with resistance. Those we are leading may be focused on how everyone else and that can produce hesitancy. In other words, people may say, “but everyone has square windows! Why do we need rounded windows? Can’t we just be like everyone else?”

I believe a healthy response to that resistance sounds something like this; "We aren’t trying to be like everyone else. We want to move fast and farther. For those who want to stay on the ground, square windows are perfect, but we want to fly and we have clarity around our destination.” Doing things in a new way requires leaders to articulate the why.

Healthy teams and organizations not only need leaders who understand how context impacts their leadership, but they also need followers who will embrace this reality. The best groups I work with have followers who echo their leader’s message of contextuality.  They understand that to arrive safely at their destination they may have to embrace innovation and change.

One of my favorite questions to ask when working with a new group is, “If I were to join your team or organization what are some of the things that I would notice you do differently?” When no one raises a hand it raises a red flag. In contrast, elite groups are always able to share very specific examples of how they do what they do.

Square windows on a commercial airplane have a failure point and leaders must be aware of their organizational failure points.

High-performing teams are made of leaders and followers who are rooted in the contextuality of their work.

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