Category Being A Leader

Team dynamics are an important predictor of organizational culture.

Teams that work well together perform better (and they are more fun to be a part of).

To achieve this advantage, teams must master five specific behaviours.

1. Focusing on Achieving Collective Results

Teams can accomplish things that individuals could never do on their own can’t.

So the ultimate measure of success for any team is the results it produces.

2. Holding One Another Accountable

A team can only reach its goals only when everyone does his or her job. Therefore, our ability to achieve collective results is reliant not only on our individual efforts but also on the combined efforts of every team member.

It naturally follows that it is the responsibility of every member of the team to push every other member of the team to do his or her best.

3. Committing to Decisions

There is one simple concept that makes all the difference in the world when it comes to holding another person accountable for something…did the parties commit to the decision in the first place?

If we have not established clarity around our shared expectations and gained agreement on our respective roles and responsibilities, then the idea that we would be willing to hold each other accountable is absurd.

4. Engaging in Conflict Around Ideas

There is a saying that people must “weigh in to buy in.” If we are going to ask all members of a team to truly commit to a shared vision, then we need to be darn sure we get all the ideas (and emotions) out on the table.

And the only way to make sure that all voices are heard is by having the team be collectively willing to engage in healthy and respectful conflict around ideas. 

5. Building Trust With One Another

Putting your own ideas out there, especially when they go against “bolder” personalities or the whole group, can be difficult. When team members are fearful of attacks or uncertain about how others will respond, there’s a natural tendency to hold back and just stay quiet and not show vulnerability.

But there is one key element that enables teams to push past the typical discomfort of associated with conflict: it’s called “trust.”

Trust in that my teammates are good, honest and have the best of intentions.

RESULTS!

When teams dedicate focused effort on learning to be vulnerable with each other, the result is a domino effect that enables the team to….

Build Trust with One Another, which enables the team to … 

Engage in Conflict Around Ideas, which enables the team to … 

Commit to Decisions, which enables the team to … 

Hold One Another Accountable, which enables the team to … 

Focus on Collective Results, which enables the team to…

ACHIEVE COLLECTIVE RESULTS!

What is the condition of your Organization’s Culture?

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Imagine taking over a company that was losing $17 Billion each and every year.

That is SEVENTEEN BILLION DOLLARS. Each year. And, every year.

Billions with a “B.”

This was the situation Alan Mulally faced when he was recruited away from Boeing to lead the failing Ford Motor Company.

While chairing a worldwide leadership meeting, Mr. Mulally looked at a dashboard that showed ‘green-lights’ on every department, division and product. He asked himself and then the attendees, “if everything is going so well, why are we losing $17B.’

Mr. Mulally spoke at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he discussed the turnaround efforts at Ford, which took the automaker from an annual loss of $17 billion in 2006 to its most profitable period in more than a decade.

Mulally explains that leadership takes courage, has a point of view about the future, and pursues it in the face of resistance and doubt in service of something great.

The entire video is excellent and well worth your time to watch

But if time is short, skip ahead to the 24:11 mark and watch the segment on building accountability (approx 9 minutes)

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I have seen a theme across clients and potential clients with whom I speak.

It is the same problem regardless if they are a team of 100, 1,000 or 10,000 people.

As they have grown, their Leaders and leadership competencies have not kept pace with the organization’s growth, and they ask:

I don’t think my organization has the leaders required to be successful?

Why am I not getting an ROI on investments in leadership development?

My direct reports hit their objectives, but the whole organization is not seeing improvements?

Gartner Inc (an international HR consultancy) surveyed HR leaders worldwide, and the results are stunning. They found that:

75% of organizations do not have the right Leaders for the future

32% of HR Leaders would replace members of their Senior Leadership Team if given the opportunity

Stunning?

Not to me, as this is what clients tell me. One client sheepishly confessed that they believe that 60% of their supervisors and managers do not have the competencies needed to do their jobs.

What Is Going On?

Most leaders are effective at ‘traditional leadership’ competencies of problem-solving, agility, collaboration, talent management and innovation.

But they are woefully ill-prepared to lead in an enterprise setting or in the leadership environment we have as we close in on the year 2020.

• Personal Relationships have become more complicated:
  • More Stakeholders to Consult – Most agree that the number of people they need to consult with to make a decision has increased
  • Shifting Job Requirements – 80% of leaders feel their job is more diverse and has more responsibilities than before

• Team Dynamics Are Moe Complicated
  • Remote Teams – Over 50% of leaders have direct reports in different locations.
  • Less Time to Spend With their people – most leaders spend less than 3-hours per week with their direct reports

Read this to learn what your employees think of you

The Results:

According to Gartner:

68% of Leaders feel they do not have the control they need to lead their teams successfully

63% of Leaders understand how to contribute to the success of the whole organization

65% of Leaders do not believe they will not get recognition for contributing to the success of the whole organization

Of course, we need to focus on individual objectives, but we desperately need to work together so that the whole organization can be successful.

We need to shift from strong individual leadership to strong network leadership to:

1. Connect Strategies – Leaders need to have performance objectives that incorporate their strategic needs beyond their business unit.

2. Prioritize Cross-Functional Coordination – Leaders need to be encouraged to seek out cross-functional partnerships.

3. Strategically Align Resources – Leaders must prioritize resources to business unit objectives that align with organizational goals.

4. View Talent as a Corporate Asset – – Leaders need to be encouraged to share opportunities to leverage their team’s expertise elsewhere in the organization.

Read how to Lead through rapid growth.

Three Changes You Can Make to Leadership Investments

• Change 1 – Invest in Changing Leadership Skills and Mind-Sets

The current generation of leaders honed their skills by watching the most executives, seemingly, achieve great outcomes on their own.

Organizations need to invest in developing enterprise leadership skills and behaviours proven to drive organizational results.

• Change 2 – Make it Easier to Collaborate.

Enterprise leaders know who they can get help from and who they can help.

Unfortunately, most leaders don’t have all the information they need to understand when to take or help the organization because gathering this information takes time.

Organizations must increase the transparency into leaders’ relative strengths and needs to explain better how those capabilities align with the organization’s strategic objectives.

• Change 3 – Recognize and Reward Enterprise Leadership

Organizational contributions are hidden, go unrewarded, and often are silently punished.

Barely one-third of these leaders say their contributions to others’ work are rewarded or recognized. Often enterprise-level objectives are not specific enough to galvanize action or accurate enough to capture the ways leaders can meet these objectives.

When I was leading a large team inside a large organization, I could easily have been overwhelmed by 100’s of emails every day.

100’s!

Emails from Bosses, Peers & Subordinates.

Messages from stakeholders and partners.

And then I was saved by my, now, good friend Hugh Culver. My boss brought in Hugh to speak with us about time management. I didn’t know Hugh at the time, and I was looking forward to another ‘time management seminar’ like it was a root canal.

Are You Spending 80% of Your Time on the Wrong 20%?

First, I was blown away by Hugh’s energy and style. Then he taught us a couple of tips that I use to this day. Then I added a lesson I learned in the Army called BLUF (best articulated by Gen Stanley McCrystal).

These simple things have saved me countless hours and made life immeasurably easier.

Turn alerts off

As Hugh says, “just seeing, or hearing, an alert on your smartphone, tablet, or computer pulls you away from what you’re working on and forces you to think about that email. Remember this: the mind won’t ignore something unfinished. An alert pulls your valuable cognitive resources away from what you are trying to finish and says, “Hey, look over here—I want your attention!”

Create rules

Rules can quickly remove email from your In-box and give you a filing cabinet-type organization system. Here are good descriptions of how to set these up for Outlook, Gmail (called “filters”). The two must-adopted rules are:

1. 1. Create a folder called ‘CC’ and set up a rule that will automatically redirect any email that you are a copy addressee out of your inbox and into the ‘CC’ folder.

This will clear out your inbox of all but the email that is most important. And you can always visit the ‘CC’ folder and review messages any time later.

1. 2. Create a rule that will flag or highlight emails from those who are most important to your work. This could be your boss or your direct reports.

Obviously, this will allow you to focus on the truly highest priority messages.

 BLUF

The McCrystal Group has recently written about BLUF’ing your in-box. One simple but highly effective way to focus attention on what matters most is by using BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front). The method is straightforward: start an email by writing “BLUF” in bold and include a 1-2 sentence summary statement, including any necessary actions.

Below are two example emails. See how long it takes you to extract the relevant information in Sample 1 compared to Sample 2.

SAMPLE 1 Traditionally formatted email message body

From:

To:

Subj:

Sue, We will be presenting our proposal to the Board of Directors on February 3rd. You were instrumental in September during the early-stage development, and we could use your help now that we are working on the presentation. We’ve received some intel that the Board will be specifically looking for justification for why we want to go with Vendor B despite being 20% higher than Vendor A. You have the best technical background to articulate a compelling argument for our recommendation. Would you be able to review the presentation as a whole and then provide any relevant input for section 2? Specifically, we could use your thoughts on Slides 7-9. Ideally, we’d like to get your edits by January 31st. Please let me know if you think that will work for your schedule.

SAMPLE 2 BLUF formatted email message body

From:

To:

Subj:

BLUF: Requesting input on the justification for the selection of Vendor B (Slides 7-9 of BoD presentation). Input needed by Jan 31st.

Sue, We will be presenting our proposal to the Board of Directors on February 3rd. You were instrumental in September during the early-stage development, and we could use your help now that we are working on the presentation. We’ve received some intel that the Board will be specifically looking for justification for why we want to go with Vendor B despite being 20% higher than Vendor A. You have the best technical background to articulate a compelling argument for our recommendation. Would you be able to review the presentation as a whole and then provide any relevant input for section 2? Specifically, we could use your thoughts on Slides 7-9. Ideally, we’d like to get your edits by January 31st. Please let me know if you think that will work for your schedule.

Both e-mails have the same text, but the message and request are far clearer in Sample 2 than Sample 1.

Save your teams the time, and confusion, of digging through longwinded texts by offering a “BLUF” at the start of your messages.

Read the secret habits to make you a better leader

Finally

Implement any or all of these three, and the ROI on your time will increase by about approximately 1 Gazillion percent!

Canadians’ have an image of politeness and don’t usually like words like ‘conflict.

In fact, we can be pretty smug about our politeness. Along with maple syrup, hockey and wood, smugness is our #1 export.

For so many people, the idea of conflict seems to imply something negative, even harsh. “Why not ‘discussion’ or ‘debate’ or ‘disagreement’?” Or even worse, ‘Consensus.’

Read about Consensus

But I like the honesty and forthrightness of the word ‘conflict.’ I suppose that’s why I think it’s the right word.

In the Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Patrick Lencioni wrote that there is no way to avoid being uncomfortable when it comes to building a truly cohesive team.

And yet, it is so tempting to try. “Let’s just agree to disagree.” “Let’s take that off-line.” “I think we agree more than we disagree.” It is astounding to me the lengths many leaders will go to avoid that awkward moment when two people realize that they “passionately disagree” (a.k.a. engage in conflict) about something vital.

No matter how well those people know one another and how many times they have had those moments, it will ALWAYS be uncomfortable.

I use the word conflict intentionally to prepare people for the full challenge that it presents. Calling it discussion or debate or simple disagreement tempts them to strive to avoid the raw and challenging reality that conflict entails.

So, the next time you’re in a meeting, and you find yourself trying to avoid one of those uncomfortable moments, stop and let everyone know that you’re going to overcome your fears and engage in actual conflict and that you’re doing so for the good of the team.

It will diffuse the inevitable tension that tempts everyone to back off and permit them to acknowledge their fears.

Read about holding your team accountable

The Case for Conflict

 If you follow Lencioni’s book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, they have a completely different view on the importance of workplace conflict — they actively advocate for it. For many, the confusion may lie in interpreting the actual word ‘conflict’ rather than the intent or action.

Essentially, great teams have ‘healthy ideological conflict’ that requires productive debate around ideas and concepts, not people. Great teams do not hold back. They pursue difficult conversations by getting all the facts on the table for the sake of making informed, better decisions.

High Stakes

What exactly is at stake when a team does not engage in healthy conflict? Here are four reasons:

1. Wasted Time: Revisiting unresolved conversations meeting after meeting not only drives people crazy, it wastes time. Healthy teams roll up their sleeves, get uncomfortable, attack issues head-on, and ultimately make informed decisions.

Are you all day busy or busy all-day

1. Poor Decision Making: If all the facts are not on the table and team members have not weighed in on a topic, critical information could be missing resulting in poor decisions.

1. Wasted Money: Wasted resources that result from uninformed decisions are commonplace. Spending time up-front debating an issue will ultimately translate to the bottom line.

1. Lack of Buy-In: Team members are less likely to buy into a decision if their opinion was not considered and factored into the process; thereby, affecting employee commitment.

Conflict Norms

To effectively make conflict a core part of a team’s culture, establish “conflict norms.” These are the expectations the team establishes and commits to engage in healthy conflict during team discussions.

Here are several conflict norms that work:

• Silence Equals Disagreement — One of the goals should be full participation. When team members withhold their opinion, it ultimately hurts the outcome of the discussion. We often mistake silence as support. That’s not appropriate. Often, people are silent because they disagree but are too uncomfortable to share openly. A team that embraces the conflict norm of Silence Equals Disagreement does not allow team members to sit in silence at team meetings.

• Do You Support? — At the end of a discussion, ask the team, “Do you support this direction?” Asks each team member where they specifically stand on the topic. Each team member gives their opinion regardless of their standing. Then listen and consider each opinion before moving forward with a decision.

• End the ‘Meeting-After-The-Meeting’ — Teams need to stop the post-meeting that is commonly referred to as the ‘meeting-after-the-meeting.’ I would encourage the team leader to repeat the following at the end of a team meeting: “If anyone is thinking of coming to me or anyone else on the team to rehash today’s topics, it’s not an option, so state it now.” After the shock wears off, your team will understand their only outlet is when the entire team is together.

• Debate Trumps Agenda — Teams should not consider a meeting agenda set in stone. While agendas are an important guidance tool, take the time to have a good debate about critical issues rather than moving on for the sake of covering all the agenda items. Allowing this helps generate healthy conflict on a team because team members will be assured that crucial topics will be thoroughly discussed.

• Offline Alert — During a team meeting, a substantial red flag occurs when someone says, “Let’s take that off-line.” This typically occurs because the leader doesn’t want the conversation to unfold before the entire team. In the majority of situations, it is perfectly appropriate to air the issue among the whole team. Confronting a difficult topic in the group removes ambiguity about the situation, and everyone understands its resolution.

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Smugness may be fine when it comes to National Pride and politeness, but it has no place in leadership.

But leaders need to embrace the power of conflict and set the stage for engaging in healthy debate.

Teams that use conflict effectively will drive toward better decisions, develop strong team commitment, and ultimately results.

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.