LEMON: A way for team to work better together

In 2013, I experienced my best teamwork experience ever using the Lemon Leadership framework. Let me explain...

About 12 years ago, I was accepted into the ACTIVATE! Change Drivers program, and two of the tools they used to help us develop leadership skills was Gallup Strengthsfinder and Lemon Leadership. LEMON stands for five leadership archetypes that affect the way we work, namely: Luminary, Entrepreneur, Manager, Organiser and Networker. The archetype is not fixed and we often change the ways we work depending on the role or situation we find ourselves in, but Lemon can help us understand our dominant tendencies, how we see the nature of work and decide what needs to be done. 

My LEMON Leadership go-to guide.

I love LEMON because the ultimate goal is to help us understand each other better, reduce conflict and assess whether we have the right skills - and mindsets - for a project at various stages of the process. According to the author, Brett Johnson Snr, the idea originated when a group of successful leaders who had already achieved great things individually - each with 'twenty to thirty years experience under their belt' - came together for a joint venture but couldn't get past the meeting phase and struggled to agree on what needed to be done when. Johnson writes: 

'They were passionate and had a strong sense of purpose [and] common values that could pave the way for good relationships, communication and decision making. Things should have gone smoothly, but they didn't. On more than one occasion, I found myself nonplussed by the perspectives of people whom I considered to be good friends, gifted individuals and all-round great people. I observed what I perceived to be an inconsistency between reality as I saw it and actions from other leaders.'

Some of these inconsistencies as outlined in LEMON include our overall ideas of business, what we consider important or integral to the process, our perception of time or deadlines (long-term vs short-term thinking) and what we consider as 'done'. With the Luminary, for example, ideas precede action, while for the Organiser, activity is king. 

Each archetype has its place in the process. This is how it played out in practice at ACTIVATE! Each Activator did the assessment and one of each archetype was brought together to form a group, with the task of conceptualising a project. I am a Luminary (ideas person) with a subtype of Networker. As a result, without intervention, I can overthink and be slow to action. Here's how the magic happened: 

We were a group of four. As a Luminary, I led the brainstorm and we identified a group issue of unemployment and access to job-search resources as the challenge. We came up with a 'CV Bus' concept with computers and support that could travel to communities, and then identified what we needed (a bus, computers, printers, paper, staff, petrol, ink, etc). Our Manager mapped each person's tasks and deadlines and took charge of monitoring production. Our organiser worked with me (subtype: Networker) to identify leads and we researched and called around to ask about costs for each of these things. The entrepreneur handled sources of funding, risks, etc. Everyone went their separate ways, with our Manager as the central check-in point for me and everyone else. The biggest surprise was our Organiser. She had presented as an introvert who until that day, had said very little during the programme. Who knew: she was a finance whizz that took a our pricing, numbers and logistics and imputted everything in a 5-star excel spreadsheet! There were no issues, no miscommunication, no gaps, etc. The next morning I presented and we won the round of funding, which I was very disappointed to learn was not real, but part of an imaginary exercise. 

I've used the Lemon Framework to help me understand the way that I work, as well as what kind of skills are needed to successfully take a project to market. I also use it to reduce conflict and understand where someone else is coming from when we disagree on what needs to be done next. There are both benefits and weaknesses attributed to each archetype (for example, Organisers often have a very disorganised process and Luminaries are slow to implement) but part of the value is understanding how we fill the gaps for each other. The project process is interdependent. If you are struggling with group dynamics, I believe that LEMON could be a great investment to help your team work better together.  *I am not affiliated with LEMON in either way and was not paid or asked to do this. I just love the way I have worked with it over the years. 

To learn more about Lemon Leadership or take the LEMON assessment, visit: https://www.brettjohnson.biz/lemon-leadership 

To learn more about ACTIVATE! Change Drivers, see https://activateleadership.co.za/ 

*Lenina Rassool is a writer, journalist and multimedia producer with 20 years’ experience in mainstream media and social justice spaces respectively. She has worked as a features Femina and Cosmopolitan Magazines, for Activate! Change Drivers (youth) and OpenUp (civic tech) and have spent the past five years in broadcast production producing and presenting The Womxn Show and Mental Health Matters on Cape Town TV. To see more of my work, visit https://leninarassool.wixsite.com/mysite