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The Individual in a Group - Part 2

Specific types of individuals who can be anticipated in any group meeting will include representative samplings of these:

The Power Jockey. This type has a hidden agenda in any meet­ing; he is seeking to build his own personal power or prestige, either as an individual or as the leader of a clique. He gives him­self away by frequent stubborn and usually uncalled-for attacks on other members or on ideas or suggested lines of action for reasons which have nothing to do with the main issue.

The Deflator. This individual may be an incipient power jockey, or he may be supporting a jockey. His troublemaking usually takes the form of an attack on a personal level which isintended to deflate and reduce the prestige of another member.

The Loyal Outsider. Here is an individual with a real problem. He is usually a willing and helpful member of the group—at least, he tries to be. Nevertheless, as a loyal representative of an outside organization or department—and only incidentally a member of the meeting group—he suffers from divided loyalty. He wants to help the group do its job effectively, yet he feels he must resist any attempt to blame, examine, or involve his parent group in any way. He can usually be spotted by the appearance of con­fusion, irritation, or stubbornness when the subject being covered gets close to his primary-group interests. Other times, he will be a most cooperative and useful member of the larger group.

The All-wise. This is the member who comes to a meeting with a problem-solution all thought out and decided—at least in his own mind. Instead of being present to share knowledge and con­sider other opinions, he has his answer in his hip-pocket. (A minor subtype is the snap-judger—he gets his answer in the opening minutes of any meeting, then tucks it away for the proper time to present it.) The all-wise is usually intelligent enough to realize that a premature revelation of his solution will not sit well with other members of the group (such a revelation might imply that he as an individual is smarter than the group), so he waits until he judges the time to be ripe for a solution suggestion. In the process of this judging, his mind is pretty well closed to any other solution or suggestion, and he will probably not be either objective or even active in contributing to the major group effort.

The Withholder. Either lack of confidence or mental laziness can be the root trouble with this member. He may hold back an honest opinion or answer because of a fear that someone will dis­approve, and he will lose stature. Or he may come to the meeting in the first place with a determination that this is not his problem, that someone else can do the thinking and the work. He is satis­fied to be "a good listener." To switch this member's participa­tion from the passive to the active is one of the toughest jobs a group leader can face. Occasionally, you may be so unfortunate as to meet up with an entire group of withholders. Then it will take every trick in your leader's bag to get the meeting moving. (Some such "tricks" will be covered in Chapter 11.)

These individuals are seldom met in a "pure" state in any creative group. (In any event, it need not be disastrous for the meeting, if the leader can spot the type he has to deal with early enough!) Any individual may move from one category to another as the meeting or conference progresses and as the subject being covered moves nearer or farther from the individual's particular interests or field of knowledge. Furthermore, in a fast-moving group situation, the leader cannot always attend to each person as an individual. He must deal with a composite of all of them. Fortunately, a kind of law-of-averages comes into play to help the leader.

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