Fourteen years ago, I was working in Kosovo with the glamorous title of ‘Psychosocial Officer’. Due to the war and the ethnic cleansing that had taken place, there was concern regarding the impacts of PTSD. One of my projects was to launch two therapeutic preschools.

I established the first school in a poor, minority community of Roma and Ashkali. It had two classes of students. Both classes were more or less identical in composition and were held in the same room at different times. The same teachers worked with both classes. They had the same curriculum, equipment, and toys.

Within the first couple of months, we noticed that one of the classes seemed to get wildly out of control during the day. The other class seemed fine and reasonably well behaved. The teachers were unable to understand or get a handle on the situation.

I began observing the classes. I noticed that during unstructured play time, teachers brought out toys for the students. Some of the children in the challenged class seemed to escalate around the toys – grabbing all that they could, unwilling to share, unwilling to let other children play. Their agitation spread to others – creating fights, leading to crying and soon everyone was wound up. It would take extensive time trying to calm the room down and refocus them.

At first, we weren’t sure what to do. Should we introduce some sort of a disciplinary process with the few kids who would initially get out of control? Should we do some sort of class-wide reward and punishment? Should we take away playtime or toys altogether?

As we reflected on this we realized a couple things:

We had introduced the trigger into their environment: Toys were foreign to these children. Even though I purchased the toys in the same city – this was a desperately poor and segregated community – few of these children owned much in the way of commercially produced toys. While children here played – they didn’t really do so with toys. So, they didn’t grow up learning to own and share.

Our goal was not to teach kids to play with toys or how to share well: Sharing in play is an important lesson for children. But our children had so many things to process, in general, this just didn’t seem to be the right place to focus our attention and energy.

So, we decided to not bring out the toys for the one class of students. Instead, the teachers played structured games with them like ‘Duck, Duck, Goose.’ The children loved this. They never noticed that the toys disappeared. It’s possible that they enjoyed this time even more than before. Most importantly – the behavior issues instantly disappeared.

What I learned:

• Sometimes there are ‘things’ in the environment that agitate or frustrate the people we lead. This could be anything, but in the workplace, this usually manifests as a form of ‘system’ or ‘environment/culture’.
• I may be responsible for introducing (or not introducing) that system or shaping that environment.
• I had to be clear on what our goals were – in this case, the training and support that would’ve been needed to help kids relate to toys would have been a distraction from our priorities.
• When addressing systemic or environmental issues – it often is more effective and efficient to change them directly – as opposed to attempting to change individual reactions to them.

I’m not inferring that leaders should create wide-scale changes every time someone is unhappy or doesn’t like a new process. However, the effective leader should reflect on whether or not this system or environmental condition is essential to the mission. If it isn’t – then change is most likely called for.

Systems and environment should, ideally, serve the mission or productivity. At a minimum, they shouldn’t detract from it.

Sometimes as leaders we become defenders of, and servants to, the tool. We need to make sure that our tools (which are sometimes the systems we build and environments we create) are servants to the mission and goals of the organizations we lead.