Archives March 2021

Is Your Leadership Team Too Large? Steps For You To Right-Size It!

Right-Sizing Leadership Teams

‘Right-sizing has to be one of the more detested words in modern business language, mostly because the use of it often indicates a lack of courage.

Rather than come right out and say ‘lay-off’ or ‘firing,’ too many leaders announce that they will right-size their organization, as though this will somehow change the reality of what they are about to do, which is to eliminate jobs and let employees go.

Of course, eliminating jobs and laying people off is a reality of business. No one can fault a leader who has to make those difficult decisions as long as they do it with appropriate discernment and gravity.

What is ironic to me is how often executives fail to step up to the plate when it is time to do what the term right-sizing actually means, particularly when dealing with their leadership team.

So many executive teams I deal with are simply too big.

Whether they have eleven or fourteen or eighteen members, they become gangly and cumbersome, making it impossible to be nimble and responsive in their responsibilities to steer their organization through rough waters or even relatively calm ones.

Why Your Leadership Team MUST Be Your First Team

So what is the right size for a leadership team?

Somewhere between three and eight.

Why?

Because groups larger than this almost always struggle to effectively use the two kinds of communication required of any team.

Chris Argyris, a professor at Harvard, came up with the idea years ago that people need to engage in both ‘advocacy’ and ‘inquiry’ to communicate effectively.

Advocacy states an opinion or an idea, while inquiry is asking questions or seeking clarity about someone else’s opinion or idea.

However, when there are too many people at the table, inquiry drops off dramatically, mostly because people realize that they’re not going to get many opportunities to speak. Hence, they weigh in with their opinion while they have the chance.

When the team is smaller, two things happen.

First, trust can be exponentially stronger. That is simply a matter of physics.

Second, team members know that they’ll have plenty of time to make their ideas heard, even if they make more inquiry than advocacy. This leads to better and faster decisions. Those large leadership teams can often take three times longer to arrive at decisions.

Decisions that prove to be poorer, often due to the quest for consensus.

Is Consensus A Dirty Word?

How does a leader go about right-sizing a team?

First, understand the reason for having such a large team in the first place.

They often put people on the team as a reward or to placate them for another unrelated issue. Or maybe, they fall for the inclusivity plea, trying to demonstrate to the organization that they are open to many different opinions and value everyone’s input.

Once a leader has come to terms with why the team has grown so large, it becomes time to right-size the team.

The key to doing this is to avoid the band-aid approach, which involves painfully choosing people to take off the team, one at a time.

A better method is to create a new team, starting from scratch.

That means if you have twelve people on the team, try forming a real executive team with just four or five and add one or two more from there if necessary.

Then unapologetically explain to the old team why the new one is necessary and why you’ve formed it the way you did.

You can keep the old team intact for other purposes, like communication and development, but not for making the regular decisions that must be made quickly and with the right mix of debate and decisiveness.

As A Leader, Running Good Meetings Is Your Job!

One of the things you’ll learn is that the people who are not on the new team will probably thank you.

In many cases, they see and experience the dysfunction of too many members. While there may be a temporary sting at not being on the new one, any good executive will be mature enough to see the benefits to the organization overall.

If they aren’t mature enough to do that, you probably shouldn’t have had them on the team in the first place.

Consensus May Not Be A Dirty Word, But It Is A Lazy Leadership Word

Once Margaret Thatcher described consensus as to the opposite of leadership. 

She felt that consensus is an abdication of leadership obligations; true leaders take you somewhere the group otherwise would never go.

I believe, the need to “build consensus” can be an excuse to avoid making hard but necessary decisions. 

Read about tough decisions

At best it could be a well-intentioned but naive effort to achieve an impossible unanimity. 

Regardless of the cause, the search for consensus can leave the organization locked in inactivity.

At one time, consensus was a perfectly fine word and being a “consensus-builder” was a perfectly fine leadership characteristic.

Yet, in my opinion, consensus has become an excuse.

An excuse for not meeting the unpleasant duties of personal and organizational leadership.

The search for consensus creates an environment where the perfect has become the enemy of done and leads to organizational paralysis and irrelevance.

I have too often observed leadership teams where every action is agreed to by consensus, which causes the organization to be locked in constant and unproductive conflict.

Conversely, I have been part of teams where the debates are vigorous (sometimes even heated), and the decisive votes may be close but turn into action because the underlying values, principles and direction of the team are so strong that it results in an organizational and leadership culture that is robust and healthy.

Read about clarity to leadership teams

Consensus is different because it creates danger. After all, you might assume consensus just because you have the votes.

The real world of leadership is where divisions persist and where differences cannot be eliminated, only bridged.

A leader who understands the extent of the limits of consensus can take the organization where it needs to go.

The leader who knows how to maximize or even expand the scope of consensus is in a position to take their team and organization to new heights. 

Consensus used in the best sense of the word could be the key to unlocking the organization’s full potential.

Read about the First Team

 

 

Trust & Chance: 2 Things You Need for Leading in a Crisis

Trust & Chance: 2 Things You Need for Leading in a Crisis

Leading in a crisis presents an entirely new scope of challenges, and leaders of all kinds need to be prepared. I have given many workshops and keynotes in the past year where I relate my leadership experiences from the army and responding to disasters.

Leading in a crisis

There is one question that comes up at the end of almost every one of the bookings: How do you lead people during emergencies when they are scattered all over the place, and you have no idea what is going on?

The short answer? Trust and chance.

In 2011 there was a wildfire that tore across the bush in northern Alberta that forced the evacuation of 17,000 people. By the end, over 500 homes were destroyed, 300 of which were in the town of Slave Lake.

During the days of the main destruction I had a dozen teams of employees and volunteers that were deploying to the affected area to support the evacuation of all of these people.

The geography covered thousands of square kilometres of northern forest that covered most of northwest Alberta. Roads were closed and cell-phone coverage, spotty at the best of times, was down due to the raging fires. My people were driving into this maelstrom to deliver humanitarian services.

(For more on leading through fires, floods, earthquakes, COVID, and more, read this post next.)

In this day and age of instantaneous broadband and high-speed communications, I was utterly in the dark for most of the beginning days of the operations. My biggest fear was that my people were driving into the fires. My only instruction to those I could get a hold of was this: No one gets killed.

Chance was on my side, and no one on my team was hurt. In fact, there wasn’t a single fire-related casualty out of all of those people forced from their homes.

Trust was on my side, because of the work we had done to build our teams. I knew that these people would do the best job they could and knew that I had their back as they made decisions and took actions in the field.

(Leading in a crisis often feels like you’re trying to move forward without a map. Here are four ways to still make progress.)

How to build trust when leading in a crisis and beyond

There is little you can do to control chance. But there is everything you can do to build trust.

Here is the top three:

  1. TRAIN your people well and in challenging situations. Military leaders have learned repetitive training builds muscle and memory triggers that win out over panic when emergencies take place.
  2. NEVER, ever, discipline someone for making a decision; even if it is one you wouldn’t have made. Remember, they were there, and you weren’t. That said, when things have calmed down it is fair to review the actions taken with a coach’s or mentor’s eye around what lessons could be gained from that experience.
  3. TALK to your people in calm tones. Imagine they are in front of you; imagine putting your hand on their shoulder and talking them through a scary complex situation.

Additional leadership resources

Do you want to talk more about leading in a crisis and beyond? My services include organizational consulting as well as one-on-one coaching for new or uncertain leaders who need help finding their way forward. Let me know about the kind of results you want, and we’ll schedule a call to figure out the best way to get you there.

Looking for more leadership content? Try one of these three posts next:

This article was first published in 2015 but it was updated in 2021 just for you.

 

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