Lead Together: The Bold, Brave, Intentional Path to Scaling Your Business

by Brent Lowe, Susan Basterfield, Travis Marsh

It’s time we started building businesses differently.Despite the advent of disruptive technologies that have upended the business landscape, the structure of most companies remains largely unchanged, with traditional top-down leadership still the norm. Couldn’t there be a better way to organize work that reflects our modern world—one with nimble, invested leaders rather than disengaged, disinterested employees?The answer is yes! In Lead Together, authors Brent Lowe, Susan Basterfield and Travis Marsh offer founders, CEOs and other leaders a radical new way of working and scaling a business. Lead Together teaches you key principles and proven methods to transform models of top-down leadership into dynamic human systems of shared responsibility and accountability, through the concepts of self-organizing and self-management. You’ll hear from the leaders of more than sixty scaling businesses at the vanguard of this movement about the on-the-ground challenges and rewards of adopting a new paradigm for this path is not for the faint of heart! It is a radical approach to scaling your business—bold, brave and intentional. It involves commitment and persistence, experimentation and an appetite for change. As company founders themselves with more than fifty years of combined experience as coaches and catalysts to scaling businesses, Lowe, Basterfield and Marsh have helped countless founders and leaders like you unleash the human potential of their teams to create organizations that lead together. Are you ready to take the leap?

Genres: Leadership, Business, Management

373 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 12, 2020

Reviews

[Quinton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reinventing Organizations Continued – is another title that this book could have gone with. Lead Together is the next seminal work to follow Frederic Laloux's Reinventing Organizations. Lead Together carries on from where Laloux left off, with practical insight into the Teal movement's functional aspects. The what and how - not in a framework way, rather the key elements you will need to address in your transformation, along with some real-world stories to show you how it can look.

Whereas Laloux's work left one excited, but with a feeling of - where do I go from here? Lead Together fills that gap and leaves you with the impetus to start your transformation now armed with this practical advice from some very experienced practitioners and highly respected thought leaders.

[Frank Calberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Takeaways from reading the book:

Living healthily
- Page 293: Brushing your teeth in the morning and in the evening.
- Page 293: Exercise every day.

Finding purpose
- Page 88: What do you love to do?
- Page 88: What do you do really well?
- Page 84: Where are you naturally moving to?
- Page 84: What makes your work meaningful?
- Page 84: How does your work make a positive difference in the world?
- Page 85: How does your work help you to better understand yourself?
- Page 85: How does your work help you to grow personally?
- Page 88: What do people, you serve, need?
- Page 88: When you have served people, how have they changed?
- Page 88: Who does your work have the greatest impact on?
- Page 88: What do you do that help people reach their potential?
- Page 170: What do you intend to do?

Sensing what is going on around us
- Page 284: What do users need? What do they not need?
- Page 284: How are needs of users changing?
- Page 284: How well are we serving needs of users?
- Page 287: What question - if answered by users - could make the most difference to shaping the future of the organization?
- Page 287: What opportunities do you see?
- Page 287: What assumptions, which we have, do we need to test to find out of if they are right or wrong?
- Page 287: Who is holding very different beliefs than we are, and what would they say that we need to do next?
- Page 287: What do you sense is working and not working?

Inviting people to contribute
- Page 48: Choose coaches outside the team to proactively guide learning.
- Page 240: Strengthen diversity. Examples: Gender. Ethnicity. Geography. Sexual orientation. Personality. Values. Age.
- Pages 243 and 253: Ask people, "What do you think about.....?"
- Page 250: Trial collaboration is an opportunity to work together for a defined period of time and test the fit.
- Page 254: Invite new people to talk to people of their choice to find out what they like and do not like about working for the organization.
- Page 261: Help people learn what they can do to get things done.
- Page 263: Invite people for a cup of coffee.
- Page 265: Introduce people to people they can follow / shadow to learn how people get things done.
- Page 268: At the company FreshBooks every person spends the first month working in customer support before doing other work.
- Page 268: At Favi, newly hired engineers and administrative workers learn to operate at least one machine on the shop floor.
- Page 268: Fitzii uses the concept of a graduation period with a celebration ritual at the end. This period can be extended if someone is struggling.
- Page 268: At Favi, joiners end their onboarding process by writing an open letter to colleagues - sharing thoughts about their experience and expressing thankfulness to people who helped them along the way.
- Page 293: Have lunch regularly with another person.
Page 297: The Percolab team meets for 2 hours every Tuesday. Meetings are open to anyone - including external people.

Strengthening transparency
- Page 34: The more transparently information flows through an organization, the more empowered a team will be. How transparently does information flow?
- Page 40: If power structures are not defined, informal ones will emerge instantly. Not expressing these can be extremely harmful to the organization. How transparently do you express power structures?
- Page 138: To build a culture of accountability, acknowledge your misses and share what you will do differently in the future.
- Page 219: Questions to decide if you are ready for more transparency: 1. To what extent is lack of transparency the cause of slow or inaccurate decision-making? 2. To what extent do team members have experience with difficult conversations that arise from increasing transparency? 3. What information needs to remain confidential? 4. Who will feel more fear when transparency is increased?
- Page 231: At HolacracyOne, all salaries are transparent. Everyone suggests their own salary. Then colleagues give their response to one question: If this person did not already work here, would you advocate for hiring him or her at the proposed salary?

How do we communicate?
- Page 28: Albert Einstein: "The important thing is not to stop questioning." To what extent do you ask questions?
- Page 55: To what extent do you listen more than you speak? What is your listening / speaking ratio?
- Page 68: To what extent do you communicate what you sense? Examples: 1. It is my intuition that.... 2. I sense that it might work to....
- Page 129: After a meeting, to what extent do you write a feedback and ask people if something is missing?

How do we make decisions?
- Page 31: To what extent is leadership shifted based on who has the most knowledge and experience in a specific context?
- Page 48: When a need to make a decision comes to you, to what extent do you delegate the decision to someone that has more knowledge and experience to make the decision than you have?
- Page 60: To what extent do people decide themselves what tasks they will work on?
- Page 155: Status quo decision-making. People are unable to decide.
- Page 155: Random decision-making. A coin is flipped. Fate decides. Example: What team starts a football game?
- Page 155: Autocratic decision-making. The person with the money decides.
- Pages 155: Delegation decision-making. Part of autocratic decision-making as the person with the money puts the decision in the hands of someone.
- Page 155: Majority vote decision making: Everyone votes. The majority decides. Example: Referendums.
- Page 155: Consensus: People communicate, negotiate with each other and make compromises until they agree. The consensus process often fails because a better idea mentioned by someone is sufficient to object.
- Page 155: Consent: Make a proposal and ask the group if they have a reason not to go with the proposal. Adapt the proposal if inputs come from the group.
- Page 157: The advice process: The person who recognizes a problem is the decision-maker. He or she seeks advice 1) from people who have expertise, and 2) from people who will be affected by the decision. The person considers all advice and makes the decision.
- Pages 160-163: Generative decision-making: Everyone relevant to the decision meets. An external person, who is not a contributor to the decision, facilitates the decision making process. The first person to make a proposal becomes the proposal holder. Anyone can ask the proposal holder clarifying questions, which the proposal holder answers. One by one, each person responds to the proposal. The facilitator invites objections from every person. Participants may only object if they feel that "it will cause harm and move us backwards." If a valid objection is raised, the proposal holder develops a new proposal. The proposal is adopted when everyone gives a thumbs-up. Generative decision-making operates on the principle "Good enough for now, safe enough to try."
- Page 165: Name the decision-maker.
- Page 165: Name the method using which the decision will be made.
- Page 166: Until a decision is written down and shared with everyone, who needs to know, assume misunderstanding.
- Page 166: 2/3 of the information you wish is enough to make a decision. Waiting until you have 90% of information you wish may mean that you waited too long. Review decisions when new information comes in.
- Page 167: The more ideas developed before deciding, the better results.
- Page 167: Dot voting. Every person gets 3 dots to place by ideas that resonate most with them. Thereby, you can quickly see which ideas resonate best with the group.
- Page 256: A veto right is the right of anyone to block a decision.

How do we solve conflicts?
- Page 191: Important about conflict solving at Morning Star is that the two persons, who have a conflict, solve it together. They can call in a mediator in step 2. They can call in a listening panel in step 3. And they can call in the President in step 4.
- Page 192: Non- violent communication method to solving a conflict: Step 1: Think about what happened and write down what you did not like. Step 2: Identify emotions you felt and needs underlying those emotions. Example: You feel anger because you were not free to set a goal for your work. Step 3: Ask yourself if you are ready to consider what the other person might be observing, feeling and needing. If you are not ready, go back to step 1 with the new question "What do feel when I think about empathizing with this person? Step 4: Find empathy for the other person. Ask yourself what the other person might be observing, feeling and needing. Step 5: Think about what changed in your mind and heart.

How do we strengthen psychological safety?
Page 106: Measure psychological safety by asking people these questions:
On a scale from 0 to 10, to what extent
- is a mistake often held against you when you make a mistake?
- are team members able to bring up problems?
- do team members sometimes reject other team members for being different?
- is it safe for team members to take a risk?
- is it difficult to ask other team members for help?
- would any team member deliberately act in a way that undermines a team member's efforts?
- are the unique skills and talents of individual team members valued and utilized.
Page 106: Research of the performance of 180 teams in the Google ecosystem showed that the level of psychological safety within a team is the number one determinant of its success and productivity.

How do we increase freedom and self management?
- Page 29: To what extent do you believe that a team knows itself what is working and what is not working?
- Page 29: To what extent do you believe that a team needs freedom and responsibility.
- Page 60: Practicing self management helps you get better at self management. To what extent do you practice self management?

Questions about reflection:
- Page 38: Critical to all leadership in this new paradigm is introspection - a willingness, when challenges arise, to look first at the ways your own emotions, assumptions and habits may contribute to the problem. To what extent do you reflect?

Questions about following:
Page 66: To what extent do people follow other people, i.e. offer active, visible support to people, who are taking the lead on something?

Questions about resistance people have:
- Page 77: Can I accept that I resist this?
- Page 77: What exactly am I resisting?
- Page 77: Which fears underlie the resistance I have? What emotions come up? For example, do I feel overwhelmed, worthless, excluded or nervous?
- Page 77: Can I find anything that is meaningful in my resistance?

Questions about emotions you feel:
- Page 55: To what extent do you express vulnerability such as sharing personal stories and emotions you feel?
- Page 190: Recognize and accept emotions you feel.

Other research from the book:
- Page 40: People in positions of corporate power are 3 times as likely as those at the lower rungs of the ladder to interrupt coworkers, multitask during meetings, raise their voices and say insulting things at the office.
- Page 20: Buckminster Fuller: "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change things, build something new." To what extent are you building something new?
- Page 76: The intention for change needs to come from our personal stories and life experiences that spur us to explore something new, different and better.
- Page 130: Verbal commitments and written agreements among team members provide understanding, clarity and ownership. In developing the document, everyone shares ideas and give feedback. And everyone confirms their agreement to the co-created agreement as being "good enough for now, safe enough to try."
- Page 295: Examples of event checkout questions for each person: 1. What is one word to describe how you are leaving this meeting? 2. Which contribution from a person at this event would you like to recognize? 3. What has not been said at this event?

[Andy Cooper · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great manual for self managing organisations

I really enjoyed this book. The structure made a lot of sense as the authors walked you though how you can tackle any topic or area in the self managing organisations space. Definitely one of the best in this area and we'll worth a read if you are looking to evolve your organisation.

[Morgan Ashley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easy to implement and full of resources you can pick up in small bites or big chunks. Thank you to the team who worked together to write this book and lead by example!

[Bogdan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book surprised me. First, it provided a well-balanced and engaging introduction to new leadership and organizational structures and practices. It also inspired me to consider new perspectives about the workplace. I'm hopeful that by considering these practices and styles, we can continue to iterate and evolve how we run organizations and work together. I view the future of work more brightly after reading this book.

After reading the book, I started to implement practices such as approaches to decision making, more radical transparency with teammates and customers, as well as approaches and mindset with vendors.

I'm looking forward to revisiting the book and keeping an eye on new releases from the authors.