Respect your pinkie!
I believe we can live without our little finger, maybe if possible replace it with our thumb. After all the thumb is most important. Even Dronacharya thought that — remember the Ekalavya story?
Grrrrr! You must be feeling like sending a tight SLAP across my face and you would be right. Cos I just did it for thinking about replacing my little finger.
To set the record straight, the little finger gives about 50 percent of our hand strength, a research done by the University of Western Ontario found that losing our pinkie on our dominant hand would be catastrophic.
The reason I am discussing the pinkie and trying to ensure that we all respect and value our little finger is that oftentimes we start comparing it with the rest of the fingers and forget, that it supports and provides the strengths to the rest of the hand. I wish to draw parallels with our Teams, as our Team is exactly like our hand, comprising of thumb, index, middle, ring, and little!
Just as the hand has a specific purpose for the body, the team has a specific function and each team member brings a unique strength. As a leader, we need to harness their uniqueness and not try to train them to be a “Thumb” cos our hand would be useless if we have five thumbs!
The only difference between our hand and our team is that the hand and the fingers grow exactly at the same pace as our body, however, the team members grow at a varied speed, and hence it is important to see how we balance our team to have the right mix of the thumb, index, middle, ring and little, to able to accomplish any task.
At any given point in time, we cannot be excellent without our pinkie as he/she is the one who provides balance, strength, and leverage for the rest of the team to do the heavy lifting.
To conclude every leader should take a step back and look at their teams and ask themselves, Are they respecting their “Little finger”? or are they trying to change them to be a “Thumb”? and if so is the timing right?
