“The conduct of a company’s leadership team is directly correlated with the organization’s long-term performance.”

In her article Lessons from Team Fumbles, Susan Lucia Annunzio goes on to say “Once-venerable institutions such as Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and Royal Bank of Scotland paid the ultimate price for the behaviors of their leadership teams.”

Some of the behaviors Annunzio is referring to includes:

• Merrill Lynch and Company CEO was widely reported to thwart debate, ignore feedback from other firm leaders and fire people whose views didn’t mesh with his own.
• The single biggest mistake the Bear Stearns leadership team made was its refusal to face harsh realities. The leadership was presented with multiple opportunities to cut losses and change course. For years, executives cautioned of coming problems.
• A similar situation played out at HBOS, a U.K. banking and insurance group taken over by Lloyd’s Banking Group in January after a near collapse. Paul Moore, the former head of group regulatory risk for HBOS, was fired in 2005 after warning the bank’s board about the danger of lending money “to people who have no jobs, no provable income and no assets.”

Senior leadership teams have the most significant impact on organizational culture than any other factor. The way that senior leadership teams behave sends shock waves throughout an organization and impacts the way more junior leaders and employees behave.

Eventually, the things that senior leadership teams reward and criticize will be the same things that the organization rewards and criticizes.

If you are on a senior leadership team, this shouldn’t be a surprise. Yet why is it that so many organizations fail to recognize this?

I think the answer is pretty simple. It’s easy to appear to be a cohesive team when the economy is good, the organization is profitable, and the new business pipeline is strong. It’s much more difficult, however, when times are challenging.

And, when times are challenging cohesion on senior leadership teams is most important.

But, today’s senior leadership teams are dealing with the most challenging environment in history. Business is moving at a tireless pace of change and organizations are constantly being called upon to do more with less.  The workforce is undergoing an unprecedented demographic shift that will soon impact the ability to attract and retain top talent. And with ongoing business uncertainty come restructuring, mergers and acquisitions, and other changes that have a significant impact on employee engagement and productivity.

As senior leadership teams deal with these challenges, they all too often look for solutions on how to be more competitive and efficient while forgetting to consider the people side of the equation. They look for technology and systems improvements to solve people-related problems that often result in what I call  The Four Costliest Mistakes Senior Leadership Teams Make.

Costly Mistake #1: The Lack of Focus

Ultimately this mistake impacts a team’s ability to be effective. You might remember Steven Covey’s definition of effectiveness – the ability to get results in such a way that you can get the results over and over.

Without focus, effectiveness goes out the window.

The challenge in many organizations is that senior leadership teams get so busy spending time IN the business, focusing on the urgent day-to-day issues and minutia, instead of ON the business, focusing on creating alignment, coaching their people, and a nurturing a healthy culture.

Instead of being able to rapidly respond to new opportunities, unnecessary conflict, stress, and ambiguity of roles and accountabilities emerge on the senior leadership team.

Here are some symptoms you might see in your organization if there is a lack of focus on the senior leadership team:

• The product road map isn’t clear beyond the next 90-120 days
• Performance reviews are a “once a year” thing
• The organization flip-flops between key strategies
• Employees don’t understand how they fit into the strategic direction

People-First™ Factor #1: Alignment

To overcome the lack of focus, senior leadership teams have to be clear about the strategic direction for the organization. That becomes the foundation for everything else. Departmental goals should be created from strategic goals, and individual performance goals should be driven by departmental goals.

Secondly, senior leadership teams have to be clear about their individual roles and responsibilities.

According to Ruth Wageman, a visiting scholar in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University and director of research for the Hay Group, “The work of a truly effective executive team should be focused on key strategic and tactical issues that affect the enterprise. Certainly the team must occasionally dip into
the mundane, but for the most part it should focus on broader, more significant organizational issues that directly advance the team’s purpose.”

To stay focused on the strategic issues, senior leadership teams need a structured approach to spending time together and staying focused during that time. At a minimum, senior leadership teams should meet weekly, have longer monthly team meetings, and quarterly offsites focused on organizational strategy and team cohesion.

While many senior leadership teams want a “silver bullet” in response to the challenges they face, I believe the answers are more practical. In Part 2 of this article, we’ll discuss two additional senior leadership team mistakes and focus on how to build cohesion to overcome those mistakes.

Have you ever watched a 400-meter relay team work?
On a good team, their hand-offs are impeccable.

In fact, given two teams of equal quality runners, the team with the more efficient
hand-offs always wins. The same holds true in the work place.

Like many organizations, you probably have good people, products, and services. The differentiator, though, between you and your competitors, is often the hand-offs between teams - like Sales, Engineering, and Operations (or whatever departmental silos exist in your organization).

There’s another interesting thing about the 400-meter relay. According to Wikipedia, the world record is 37.10 seconds. The world record for the individual 400-meter race is 43.18 seconds. That’s over a six second difference!

Given the same quality of runners, a team that works well together is
always better than a “John Wayne” who works alone.

The challenge in many organizations is that individuals and departments get so focused on their own egos, agendas, and goals, and they lose sight of the larger organizational goals and put them second to their own priorities. As a result, individuals, departments, and business units end of hoarding resources without regard for the bigger picture.

So, given two organizations with equal capabilities, the competitive advantage is in the hand-offs.

What are the three keys to stop dropping the baton?

1. Get clear on the common purpose. At the end of the day, whether you work in Engineering, Sales, or Operations, you should all be working toward the same goals, and those goals supercede individual egos, agendas, and priorites.  Get clear on your common purpose and make sure it is over-communicated between departments. The common purpose is the glue that links the hand-offs together.

2. Get clear on roles and responsibilities. According to Wikipedia, transferring of the baton in the 400-meter relay is typically blind. The outgoing runner does not look backwards, and it is the responsibility of the incoming runner to thrust the baton into the outstretched hand, and not let go until the outgoing runner takes hold of it.

In the workplace, too often the baton is dropped because there are gaps in what people think they should be doing and what others think they should be doing. Close those gaps by clarifying (a) key task responsibility, (b) decision making authority, and (c) expectations between departments.

3. Get clear on team member strengths. Some people excel at project start-up while others thrive in project execution. Learn more about where the talents of your team members lie and share responsibilities accordingly.

In the 400-meter relay, perfect hand-offs often compensate for slower runners. In the workplace, perfect hand-offs result in better product quality, faster delivery times, reduced engineering defects, and ultimately higher levels of customer engagement and retention.

The People-first Bottom Line: If you want to gain a competitive advantage, don’t forget the people side of the equation - smooth out the hand-offs in your organization.

The concept of “team building” means different things to different people. Over the past 9 years I have spent a ton of time with hundreds of clients and thousands of people creating successful team building programs. Our shorter programs may span only four to eight hours in duration, and our programs focused on helping teams make a significant shift in how they collaborate may last over 9 months.

Regardless of how long the program is, I have always defined team building in three ways:

1. It is a tool to help accelerate team formation.

2. It is strategic in nature.

3. It is focused on skill development and behavioral change.

If you want to create a team building program that will have a positive impact on your team, it is important to pay attention to the pitfalls you may encounter.

Here are 4 common reasons why team building fails.

1. It is irrelevant.

- there are no clear objectives
- the facilitator never spoke to the “decision maker” prior to the event

2. It is ambiguous.

- there are no clear “tools” to take back to the workplace to help team members be more effective

3. There is a lack of commitment

- the program isn’t linked to broader professional development efforts
- there is no follow-up scheduled as part of the program

4. Inexperience

- the facilitator has no real business experience and never spent time in the boardroom
- the facilitator has limited knowledge about business or your industry

If you see symptoms such as these within your team building programs, it is likely you won’t see a change in how your team collaborates.

So, what are the keys to making team building effective?

Stay tuned for this Thursday’s blog post and I will share with you the 4 P’s of Strategic Team Building.

I recently wrote a three-part series on reluctant new managers. One cause of reluctance that I wrote about was due to a fear of losing control (which often leads to a reluctance to delegate, hand over responsibilities, etc.).

I recently came across an article called When Teams Work Best by Frank LaFasto and Carl Larson and within their article they deal with a similar issue head on. And I quote: “The best way to manage your personal control needs as team leader is to demonstrate behaviors that share control.

• Stay focused on issues - as opposed to positions - during important discussions. Allow the discussion to unfold at a pace that is comfortable for team members.
• Ask well-thought-out questions more often than you prescribe solutions. Ask yourself, “Will what I’m about to say further the discussion, inhibit it, or end it?” As you ask questions and listen, you’ll acquire insights that may make a difference in the quality of solutions.
• Repress the impulse to have the final say about every decision. Determine which decisions are critical, and carefully choose the occasions when you use your power to influence outcomes. In the spirit of collaboration, avoid the urge to maneuver the team toward a predetermined solution.
• Check with the members of your team during important decision-making processes. Ask them if they feel all perspectives are being valued and whether they believe the solution will be the product of the team’s best collective thinking - theirs as well as yours.

One of the most frustrating experiences people can have in the workplace is when there are unspoken expectations between a team member and a manager.

In a typical employment situation, certain expectations, such as salary, hours, and job duties, are clearly understood by both employer and employee. Other expectations, however, are so intimately linked to an individual’s concept of work that they often go unspoken or unacknowledged.

That’s why I love the Work Expectations Profile. It helps people explore 10 work expectations that affect today’s employment relationships and then communicate those expectations with their manager, including:

• Structure • Recognition • Environment • Teamwork • Balance • Diversity • Autonomy • Expression • Stability • Career Growth

Research has shown that people who have clearly defined, well-communicated expectations have better attitudes and enjoy greater job satisfaction than people whose expectations go unspoken or unrealized. And companies that employ satisfied, successful people reap the rewards of increased productivity and reduced turnover.

Interested in trying The Work Expectations Profile out in your organization? Send us an email: info@512solutions.com.