68 Ducere Est Servire: THE LEADERSHIP JOURNAL OF DALLAS BAPTIST UNIVERSITY or in the cubicle, and Kouzes and Posner’s work highlights this very phenomenon. Essential to good leadership, their work indicates, is the ability and dedication to “envision the future” for one’s team or organization.17 Leaders who are able to “paint a ‘big picture’ and describe a compelling image of what the future could be” are, according to this research, demonstrably and measurably more successful.18 Workers need to know what is expected of them in terms of duties and job descriptions, but for a thriving team, leaders also need to explain the purpose of their expectations. Tell me not what I am doing; tell me what I’m doing it for. This is precisely what so often makes reality so depressing and games so thrilling, because, in McGonigal’s words, “[c]ompared with games, reality is unproductive. Games give us clearer missions and more satisfying, hands-on work.”19 And “[s]atisfying work,” she continues, “always starts with two things: a clear goal and actionable next steps toward achieving that goal.”20 No matter the capacity of the leader in question, “every leader must learn to communicate a vision of his or her larger purpose,”21 as well as how that purpose will be accomplished. Second, organized efforts require agreed-upon guidelines. In games, the rules serve a dual purpose. They communicate to the players what can and what cannot be done in order to reach the stated goal. The tools available and limitations present are clearly spelled out, enabling players to move freely within the stated boundaries. And as with games, so with work. Remove the rules from a game and we have an activity, but remove the rules from the workplace and we have either chaos or paralysis. In an overview of several studies on workplace ethics, Cialdini provides an excellent biopsy of what he calls “the triple-tumor structure of organizational dishonesty.”22 These studies conclusively found that organizations and teams whose leaders behaved unethically suffered from “poor employee performance […] employee turnover [and] employee fraud and malfeasance.”23 Chaos, it would seem, does not pay any better than crime. G.K. Chesterton, on the other hand, provides an excellent picture of how a lack of boundaries can lead also to paralysis: “We might fancy some children playing on the flat grassy top of some island in the sea. So long as there was a wall round the cliff’s edge they could fling themselves into every
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