I recently wrote a post about the importance of understanding your team's purpose. After all, purpose drives everything. It drives what's on the team's "agenda" and what's not (I am using the term "agenda" more broadly than meeting agenda. I am referring to the specific areas the team should be focused on).
An important step in clarifying team purpose is to first understand the "type" of team you need (and want).
With the economy recovering and business picking up, I have been asked the following question several times by clients and potential clients in the past few weeks...
"How do we keep growing and maintain our culture at the same time?"
That is a great question.
One of the challenges that senior leadership teams face is what I call an "interesting duality."
On on hand, a senior leader is often responsible for a functional unit or team within an organization. On the other hand, they are asked to be on a team with other leaders - usually headed by a Director, VP, or CEO.
My clients often ask me,"How big should our team be?"
My answer is typically...it depends.
It depends on the purpose of the team.
The challenge on many teams is a lack of clarity about a team's true purpose. In most cases, team's don't even know that they don't know their purpose.
This is usually a bigger issue at the senior leadership team level, where a CEO, VP, or Director leads a
team of other leaders.
I have found myself reading works by Napoleon Hill, an American author who was one of the earliest producers of the modern genre of personal success literature. In the early nineteen hundreds, Andrew Carnegie commissioned him to interview over 500 successful men and women in order to discover and publish their formula for success.
The Leadership Story
It had been almost three weeks since their last one-on-one, but having returned from India and with Angela's sudden departure, Steve was anxious to get the process started again. He reflected on how easy it was for pressing matters to get in the way of focusing on important things like coaching his people.
Ben was rushed and a bit frustrated that he had to attend this one on one. Especially today, it seemed there were so many deadlines waiting on his attention.
In my last blog post, I talked about a client I worked with in Fort Collins, Colorado and how important it is to have clarity about your senior leadership team's purpose.
But let me take a step back.
"Leading from good to great does not mean coming up with the answers and then motivating everyone to follow your messianic vision. It means having the humility to grasp the fact that you do not yet understand enough to have the answers and then to ask the questions that will lead to the best possible insights."
- Jim Collins, Good to Great
I was recently facilitating a strategic team building offsite for a senior leadership team in Colorado, and at the break one of the leaders approached me to talk about one of his team members. This particular team member was having a negative impact on the overall team, but the leader was having a difficult time putting his finger on what the team member was doing that was creating such a ripple effect.
In the first two parts of this article, I discussed the impact that senior leadership teams have on their organization. The behaviors that begin at the senior leadership team level ripple through an organization, and just like a wave that grows as it nears its shore, those behaviors also grow and get repeated - regardless of whether they have a positive or negative impact on the organization.
