People
Does your team trust each other? If not, what impact do you think that’s having on the bottom line?
This is a question that we have explored with teams ranging from publicly-traded companies to nonprofits. Regardless of the size of your team or the industry you work in, “trust is the foundation of real teamwork,” writes Patrick Lencioni in his book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.
In the mid-1990s, Lencioni observed a business climate that was maniacally focused on growth with little attention paid to the fundamentals of team alignment and organizational effectiveness. As a result, Lencioni and his colleagues developed a simple online assessment that measures team effectiveness in five key areas.
1. Trust
Think about a time when you worked with a team member who you trusted. What was that experience like? Did you freely share information with her? Did you ask her for help? Admit mistakes? Now, think about a time when you worked with a team member who you didn’t trust. What was that experience like? Did you ask him for more data? Did you talk to others about his reliability? Did you try avoiding him altogether? Now multiply the results of these interactions by all of the possible team member combinations in your organization. You can quickly see how trust impacts speed, and how speed impacts results. We’re living in the age of Airbnb, Kickstarter, Etsy, and Uber – where trust is the fundamental economic driver. Yet, trusting our colleagues as much as we do total strangers is something that we have yet to master.
2. Conflict
Teams that do not trust one another will be reluctant to have open, constructive conflict. You’ve seen this in action in the form of passive-aggressive behavior, circular conversations, veiled discussions, and guarded arguments. You’ve witnessed people nodding their head ‘yes’ in the room but shaking their head ‘no’ in the hall. Teams that trust one another freely engage in debate so that they can assess reality correctly before making a common commitment. Teams that lack trust also lack the ability to effectively uncover the root causes of issues that impact performance. Instead, they spend their time dealing with symptoms and side issues.
3. Commitment
A team that can accurately assess reality will have a better chance of making clear commitments. A note of clarity here. Team commitment is not the same as consensus. When you are encouraged and inspired to share your ideas and know that you’ve been heard, you’re more likely to agree to the final decision even if it differs from your original input. As a result, you walk away motivated and feeling valued rather than resentful. Commitment requires weigh in before buy in.
4. Accountability
If you manage a team of people, you understand that part of your role is to hold them accountable for delivering results. Holding your peer team members accountable, however, is harder. This is especially true when you haven’t built trust, participated in constructive debate about root causes, or felt that your opinions about what to do to move forward haven’t been heard. You’re much more likely to call your peers out when you’ve bought into the agreed upon direction to deliver results.
5. Results
“What gets measured, gets done,” is a familiar maxim. If you are measured and incentivized based on individual effort, human nature follows that you are more likely to put your individual results over collective results. High-performing teams, however, understand that if the team loses, everyone loses. When you’re held accountable for team results, you’re much more likely to make the extra effort to help team members when they need support.
Teamwork isn’t easy. But high performing teams understand that team alignment is a competitive advantage.
Question: Are you achieving results or experiencing regrets toward team goals so far this year?
Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!
Leadership
Once or twice a year, a client and I manage to squeeze in a long-overdue lunch. We’re about the same age. We’re both women. We’ve both risen through the ranks and gained a certain amount of leadership credibility in our respective fields.
A conversation we had over lunch a few years ago haunted me for months, because I wasn’t ready with an articulate response to the career dilemma. “Susan,” as I will call her, is positioned to be tapped for a seat among the highest ranking leaders in her organization. She’s a shoo-in to sit among the President’s inner circle. She has more than enough skills and experience to succeed. She has the credibility and popular support to fast track her move. “The problem is,” Susan told me, “I don’t want the job. I’ve seen the compromises that the people at that level make to hold onto their position. I’m not interested in the politics. I can be much more effective by staying in my current role.”
Outside, I gazed at Susan with empathy. Inside, however, I wanted to shake her, and shout, “No! You have the potential to use your influence to reshape the reputation of the inner circle. You can’t just walk away and abdicate your responsibility to break down the barriers!” I kept my mouth shut. Paid the bill. Left Susan to swim in her career tension without advice.
Later, I shared this story with my colleague, leadership author and scholar, Dr. Tony Baron. Tony suggested that leadership success depends on the ability to embrace – not shun – the inherent tensions we feel as we move into higher levels of influence. “When you ignore the tension in your gut,” Tony said, “you compromise integrity. Successful leaders develop a sense of comfort in the tension. They don’t freeze when tension hits. They act. They don’t allow action anxiety to keep them from doing what they know is right, even at personal risk,” Tony added. Here are four ways he noted that successful leaders embrace tension:
1. Think Hamlet. The next time you feel tension about taking action, ask yourself if you’re over-exaggerating the risk. “Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of troubles,” is the tension described by Hamlet in Shakespeare’s play of the same name. When we allow ourselves to indulge in negative fantasies, we give ourselves an iron clad excuse for inaction.
2. Reject the false comfort of agreement. We’ve all been in meetings where a decision is made that we feel is inherently wrong. Yet, we don’t speak up. Why? It’s because of another form of action anxiety when we fear acting contrary to the group. This behavior was addressed by management expert Jerry B. Harvey in his 1974 article “The Abilene Paradox: The Management of Agreement“. When we ignore what we know is sensible at the risk of being ostracized for speaking up, we allow our team to suffer from the false comfort of agreement. (Check out this clip of a video adaptation of The Abilene Paradox.)
3. Indecision as a decision. A large part of a leader’s role is to make tough calls. Sometimes those calls will pay off. Sometimes, they will fall short. Yet, if you have 100% of the information you need to make a decision, you’re not making a decision at all. You’re stating a foregone conclusion. When you make a choice, you put yourself at risk of being wrong. When you indefinitely delay decisions, however, you put your organization at risk of extinction.
Leadership comes with uncertainty. It’s a messy position that requires acts of bravery in the face of fear of failure, fear of rejection, and fear of risk. But leaders who push past their personal fears for the good of others are those who think of tension not as a threat, but as a tool.
Question: Is your instinct to freeze in the face of tension, or embrace it?
Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!
Mindfulness
“On the morning of April 7, 2007, I was lying on the floor of my home office in a pool of blood. On my way down, my head had hit the corner of my desk, cutting my eye and breaking my cheekbone. I had collapsed from exhaustion and lack of sleep.” Those are the opening words of Thrive, the 2014 New York Times Bestseller written by Arianna Huffington, co-founder and former editor-in-chief of HuffPost.
That fall was her wakeup call. It caused her to re-think her definition of success and to seriously consider the impact of stress on her life.
Stress. It’s become such a prevalent part of our workdays that we’ve come to accept it as an occupational necessity. Yet, the long-term effects of stress can be lethal. Stress is a factor in 75% to 90% of all medical visits, and a factor in the six leading causes of death.
If you consider yourself a leader who thrives under pressure – if you work best under a deadline – you may be addicted to stress. According to Heidi Hanna, author of Stressaholic, “stress is a drug.” When we’re under the gun, stress releases dopamine and feeds endorphins to our brains which temporarily boosts performance.
As a leader, you have a responsibility to create a culture of performance. Over time, your time-crunched lifestyle can not only have serious health implications for you, but can have a debilitating impact on your organization. Here are two practices that will help you navigate the path between stress and success:
Be Mindful. Our response to stress is something we inherited from our ancestors. It was a fight or flight response that triggered an ‘all systems go’ reaction in the body. When faced with a sabre-toothed tiger, that reaction was designed to improve our chances for survival by releasing a burst of cortisol to mobilize the body for action.
Although the sabre-tooth is extinct, our flight or flight mechanism is alive and well. Any time we face a threat – a deadline, a conflict with a colleague, a financial struggle – our body goes into stress mode. It releases cortisol causing our blood pressure to rise and our heart to beat faster. But, without a physical release of fighting or fleeing, the cortisol builds up in our system. That’s the bad news.
The good news is that we can train our brains to recognize these sensations in the moment, and learn to react calmly instead of letting out our inner caveman. It’s a practice known as mindfulness.
As defined by Dr. Kabat-Zinn, mindfulness is “paying attention in a particular way; on purpose, in the present moment and non-judgmentally.” The next time you’re in a stressful meeting, try the ABC method of mindfulness. Become Aware of the stress rising in your body. Breathe deeply and consider your options. Then Choose thoughtfully.
Build Margins. Today’s leaders are incredibly busy. Everyone, it seems, wants a piece of you. And no one seems to appreciate the fact that you are a finite resource. Perhaps you don’t even realize this yourself. You can’t be an effective leader if your calendar is crammed with back-to-back meetings and your inbox is full of unread messages.
“To be truly effective,” says leadership expert Dr. Tony Baron, “you need to make time for margins your life.” You need to create white space, or times of reflection so that information can be turned into knowledge, and that knowledge into insight. Sometimes, you just have to stop and let the information catch up with you.
Building margins in our lives helps us get over our feeling of scarcity that leads to stress. We start by stressing that we never have enough time, that we cannot make time to truly connect with our employees, that there is only so much to go around.
Margin is not something that just happens. You have to fight for it. You can start by creating a time budget like this one from Michael Hyatt to help you focus on what matters most.
Stress is not going away, but you don’t have to be addicted to it. Make the choice today to be mindful and build margins in your life to build the resilience you need to manage it effectively.
Question: How does stress impact your ability to lead effectively?
Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!
Leadership
Can you feel it in the air? For the past few weeks, everything around us has been changing. The sun is setting earlier. Leaves are changing in color to vibrant reds and deep yellows. There’s no denying that fall is here and winter is just around the corner. As humans, we are hard-wired to accept the inevitability of seasonal changes. Although we can manage extreme weather changes of four seasons a year, why are we so resistant to organizational changes?
If you’re engaged in the effort to set a new direction, orchestrate innovation, or mold a culture, here are six universal truths that can guide you along the way.
1. People don’t resist change. They resist being changed. As management guru Peter Senge suggests, resistance is greatest when change is inflicted on people. If you can give people a chance to offer their input, change is more likely to be met with enthusiasm and commitment.
2. A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. Big goals can seem overwhelming and cause us to freeze. This simple truth, attributed to Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, is a reminder to get moving. Take the first step, however small it may seem, and the journey is underway.
3. If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there. Many change efforts fall short because of confusion over the end goal. In the Lewis Carroll classic, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice asks the Cheshire cat which road she should take. The cat’s response reminds us to focus on the destination first, then choose the best path.
4. Change is a process, not a decision. It happens all too often. Senior executives make pronouncements about change, and then launch programs that lose steam. Lasting change requires an ongoing commitment to the process reinforced by constant communication, tools, and milestone recognition.
5. Do not declare victory prematurely. In his book, The Heart of Change Field Guide, author Dan Cohen suggests that short-term wins do not necessarily equal long-term success. Cohen writes, “keep urgency up and a feeling of false pride down.”
6. Be the change you wish to see in the world. These famous words attributed to Gandhi reminds us all — executives with associates, political leaders with constituents, or parents with children — that one of our most important tasks is to exemplify the best of what the change is all about.
Any form of change requires an adjustment period, and some are easier than others. Leaders trying to implement changes in the workplace can take heart in these truisms, settle in and enjoy the journey.
Question: Chances are, you’re going through a change effort now. Which of these truths can you apply today to help you succeed?
Driven by the premise that excellence is the result of aligning people, purpose and performance, Center for Executive Excellence facilitates training in leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. To learn more, subscribe to receive CEE News!
![Business in Focus: Health Catalyst]()
Business In Focus
A closer look at companies executing leadership excellence
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In early 2013, Kyle Salyers walked into what he thought would be a typical post-financing board meeting. As Managing Director of CHV Capital and recent investor in Salt Lake City-based Health Catalyst, Salyers’ job was to ensure that his company’s investment was in good hands with the Health Catalyst management team. What happened in that meeting, however, was anything but typical. Rather than address the 128-page board packet previously submitted to Salyers and other attendees of the board meeting, Health Catalyst’s management team chose to focus on just two slides: 1) Cultural Attributes and 2) Operating Principles.
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