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Why Does Executive Teamwork Matter?
Executives are often promoted based on their individual success. That’s partly why Marshall Goldsmith’s What Got You Here Won’t Get You There resonates with so many of us. Once promoted, it’s critical that executives build teams. We cannot expect the rest of the organization to work well together if the leadership team itself does not seem to care enough to work well together. In fact, executive team dysfunction is an indicator that leaders do not care whether people work well together.
Executive teaming works best when executives share accountability for an outcome. The more they explore possibilities together, the stronger their shared ownership and teaming will be. That—just like a lack of teamwork—will reverberate throughout the organization.
How Can Executive Teams Shape Organization Culture?
Taylor and Haneberg believe that leadership teams should discuss culture and create or polish plans for improvement quarterly. Culture change gains more velocity when the entire leadership team is driving the culture in the same direction. The opposite is also true. If one or more leadership team members does not model and support the desired culture change, he or she will undermine, endanger, and inhibit progress.
Instead of creating a mission, vision, values, and desired culture and expecting employees to internalize their unique meanings and uses, keep things simple. Think about it; if your values are not an expression of the desired culture, what are they? It is better to have a smaller list of desired cultural elements that you are willing to manage to than it is to have a longer list that you cannot model and reinforce and that becomes little more than a flowery marketing statement.
How Can You Help Other Leaders Improve?
Here’s the “Boss’s Bottom Line”: Leadership is a performance art that you learn while you do it. Leaders need to seek out mentors and role models for ideas about what to do. Leaders of leaders need to cultivate and provide an environment where that happens.
As a leader, read and benchmark to get more ideas. Seek opportunities to develop your skills. Critique your performance. Get feedback. Keep getting better.
Then, have good and thorough discussions with each leadership team member about their strengths, weaknesses, career goals, learning opportunities, and potential derailing factors (or fatal flaws). I always liked to do this quarterly in a performance and development discussion. It’s important that you continue to find ways to leverage the strengths of each of your leadership team members.
Then, use “feedforward”—where each person shares his or her goal and asks for ideas for how they can accomplish it. The “coach” offers a few ideas, and the performer says, “Thank you.” Feedforward helps people envision and focus on a positive future, not a failed past.
How Do You Evaluate Your Leadership?
Know what’s important to you and measure your progress.
Michelangelo provides some good advice for setting the bar, “The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short, but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.”
From my experience, 21st Century leaders need to value diversity. To “truly value” diversity means going beyond a paragraph in your employee handbook. It’s the efforts you make (or don’t make) to engage everyone regardless of age, race ethnicity, gender, tenure, sexual orientation, or other classification. Employees will appreciate it if they see management making every effort to treat all people well and equally and will take special note if it seems obvious to them that you truly value diversity.
Martin Luther King, Jr. speaks to me when he says, “We shall have to repent in this generation not so much for the evil deeds of the wicked people but for the appalling silence of the good people.” Leadership is about taking a stand…doing the right thing…
Colin Powell describes another indicator for leadership. He says, “Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.”
May you build a strong executive team that shapes a positive organization culture, as you shoot for the stars… Be the change you want to see in your organization today!