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The single greatest advantage any company can achieve is organizational health.
It’s as though they’re afraid to slow down and deal with issues that are critical but don’t seem particularly urgent.
An organization has integrity—is healthy—when it is whole, consistent, and complete, that is, when its management, operations, strategy, and culture fit together and make sense.
A good way to recognize health is to look for the signs that indicate an organization has it. These include minimal politics and confusion, high degrees of morale and productivity, and very low turnover among good employees.
Most leaders prefer to look for answers where the light is better, where they are more comfortable. And the light is certainly better in the measurable, objective, and data-driven world of organizational intelligence (the smart side of the equation) than it is in the messier, more unpredictable world of organizational health.
In this world of ubiquitous information and nanosecond technology exchange, it’s harder than it has ever been in history to maintain a competitive advantage based on intelligence or knowledge. Information just changes hands too rapidly today. Companies, even entire industries, come and go faster than we could have imagined even a decade ago.
After two decades of working with CEOs and their teams of senior executives, I’ve become absolutely convinced that the seminal difference between successful companies and mediocre or unsuccessful ones has little, if anything, to do with what they know or how smart they are; it has everything to do with how healthy they are.
leaders who pride themselves on expertise and intelligence often struggle to acknowledge their flaws and learn from peers.
The healthier an organization is, the more of its intelligence it is able to tap into and use.
People who work in unhealthy organizations eventually come to see work as drudgery.
That means leaders who choose to operate as a real team willingly accept the work and the sacrifices that are necessary for any group that wants to reap the benefits of true teamwork.
more than eight or nine people are on a team, members tend to advocate a heck of a lot more than they inquire. This makes sense because they aren’t confident that they’re going to get the opportunity to speak again soon, so they use their scarce floor time to announce their position or make a point. When a team is small, members are more likely to use much of their time asking questions and seeking clarity, confident that they’ll be able to regain the floor and share their ideas or opinions when necessary.
Inclusivity, or the basic idea behind it, should be achieved by ensuring that the members of a leadership team are adequately representing and tapping into the opinions of the people who work for them, not by maximizing the size of the team.
The only reason that a person should be on a team is that she represents a key part of the organization or brings truly critical talent or insight to the table.
Collectively Responsible This is perhaps the most important distinction between a working group and a real leadership team. Collective responsibility implies, more than anything else, selflessness and shared sacrifices from team members.
SNFP Training
The kind of trust that is necessary to build a great team is what I call vulnerability-based trust. This is what happens when members get to a point where they are completely comfortable being transparent, honest, and naked with one another, where they say and genuinely mean things like “I screwed up,” “I need help,” “Your idea is better than mine,” “I wish I could learn to do that as well as you do,” and even, “I’m sorry.”
Training #1
When members of a leadership team willingly acknowledge their weaknesses to one another, they give their peers tacit permission to call them on those weaknesses. Of course, it also serves to validate their strengths.
Training on Vulnerability
Training Topic
Quote
Training Topic Vulnerability
The Leader Goes First As important as it is for all members of a leadership team to commit to being vulnerable, that is not going to happen if the leader of the team, whether that person is the CEO, department head, pastor, or school principal, does not go first. If the team leader is reluctant to acknowledge his or her mistakes or fails to admit to a weakness that is evident to everyone else, there is little hope that other members of the team are going to take that step themselves.
Training Topic Vulnerability
Training Candid Conv
Contrary to popular wisdom and behavior, conflict is not a bad thing for a team. In fact, the fear of conflict is almost always a sign of problems.
Conflict without trust, however, is politics, an attempt to manipulate others in order to win an argument regardless of the truth.
Training candid Conv
But that’s not to say that even productive conflict isn’t a little uncomfortable. Even among the most trusting team members, there will always be a certain level of discomfort associated with disagreement. But it will be a healthy discomfort, a sign that there is productive tension around an issue that warrants discussion and debate.
when we avoid necessary pain, we not only fail to experience the gain, we also end up making the pain worse in the long run.
When leadership team members avoid discomfort among themselves, they only transfer it in far greater quantities to larger groups of people throughout the organization they’re supposed to be serving.
Training candid Conv
When leadership team members fail to disagree around issues, not only are
they increasing the likelihood of losing respect for one another and encountering destructive conflict later when people start griping in the hallways, they’re also making bad decisions and letting down the people they’re supposed to be serving. And they do this all in the name of being “nice.”
One of the best ways for leaders to raise the level of healthy conflict on a team is by mining for conflict during meetings. This happens when they suspect that unearthed disagreement is lurking in the room and gently demand that people come clean.
By looking for and exposing potential and even subtle disagreements that have not come to the surface, team leaders—and, heck, team members can do it too—avoid the destructive hallway conversations that inevitably result when people are reluctant to engage in direct, productive debate.
Rules of Engagement One of our consultants worked with the leadership team of a division within a large beverage company. He convinced the VP of that division that more conflict was necessary on the team. Unfortunately, they were having a hard time getting people to engage in it. This is typical. So the VP put in place two formal rules. First, if people remained silent during discussions, he would interpret that as disagreement. People quickly realized that if they didn’t weigh in, a decision could not be made. Second, at the end of every discussion, the VP would go around the room and ask
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“disagree and commit.” Basically they believe that even when people can’t come to an agreement around an issue, they must still leave the room
unambiguously committed to a common course of action.
failing to hold someone accountable is ultimately an act of selfishness.
CHECKLIST FOR DISCIPLINE 1: BUILD A COHESIVE LEADERSHIP TEAM Members of a leadership team can be confident that they’ve mastered this discipline when they can affirm the following statements: The leadership team is small enough (three to ten people) to be effective. Members of the team trust one another and can be genuinely vulnerable with each other. Team members regularly engage in productive, unfiltered conflict around important issues. The team leaves meetings with clear-cut, active, and specific agreements around decisions. Team members hold one another accountable to commitments and
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Leadership Team: Answer the questions
Thinking they’re being mature, leaders often agree to disagree with one another around seemingly minor issues, thereby avoiding what they see as unnecessary contentiousness and conflict. After all, from their vantage point, the gaps in their opinions and decisions seem small and innocuous. What they don’t understand is that by failing to eliminate even those small gaps, they are leaving employees below them to fight bloody, unwinnable battles with their peers in other departments. This leads to the antithesis of (oh, I hate to use this word) empowerment.
QUESTION 1: WHY DO WE EXIST? Answering this question requires a leadership team to identify its underlying reason for being, also known as its core purpose.
LTP Continuation
An organization’s core purpose—why it exists—has to be completely idealistic.
LTP Continuation
Some executives, especially those who are a little cynical about all this purpose stuff, will say that their company exists simply to make money for owners or shareholders. That is almost never a purpose, but rather an important indicator of success.
LTP Continuation
It must be all about clarity and alignment.
LTP Continuation
So how does an organization go about figuring out why it exists? It starts by asking this question: “How do we contribute to a better world?”
LTP Continuation
an organization’s reason for existing is not meant to be a differentiator and that the purpose for identifying it is only to clarify what is true in order to guide the business.
if an organization is tolerant of everything, it will stand for nothing.
The answer to the question, How do we behave?, is embodied in an organization’s core values, which should provide the ultimate guide for employee behavior at all levels.
The mistake those leaders made was trying to be all things to all people, which led them to make their values statements as broad and inclusive as possible.
An organization knows that it has identified its core values correctly when it will allow itself to be punished for living those values and when it accepts the fact that employees will sometimes take those values too far.
LTP Continuation
Aspirational values are the qualities that an organization is aspiring to adopt and will do its best to manage intentionally into the organization.
LTP Continuation core values
