Corporations have and continue to play a key role in the journeys of many leaders. For example, a glimpse at the emerging leadership cohort in India will show how many started their careers in talent rich companies such as Tata or Hindustan Unilever. The same is true of the USA where it is said that more CEO’s are GE graduates than graduates of Harvard Business School.
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Why so much pain? It’s July 2011 and my breath is coming in huge rasping gasps. It’s my first ride with a club and we’ve been cycling close to 20mph for what seems like forever. I am exhausted. My legs are burning. My back is aching. My lungs are ready to burst. It’s been like this for over an hour. Around me are a dozen or so other riders. They seem to be doing much better than me. There are a couple of conspicuous clues to why this might be. The first is that they are all skeletal in comparison to my more portly form. This is made more obvious by the fact that they are all sleekly attired in lycra. I am in a tee shirt, shorts and an ancient helmet. To their amusement, I’m riding in trainers instead of proper shoes clipped into the pedals. I really want to stop – but I can’t bring myself to say so. There don’t seem to be many alternatives. If I take
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I had a frustrating, but familiar, experience recently. The head of training of a large international client called me. She was planning an off-site day for the leadership team and wanted some help to design and facilitate it. As usual, I asked her a number of questions about their context, people and the purpose of the event. Alarm bells started ringing as her answers revealed that the objectives of the day were far from clear. The only thing she was clear about was some items from the HR agenda – and she had little idea what business benefits the CEO wanted to achieve. She did, however, have a number of clear requirements about the design. It was to be a single day and she wanted ‘creative outdoor exercises’ to be central to the approach. She explained that team members had been disengaged at past such meetings so they wanted to ‘liven it up’ to keep people’s interest! She didn’t know why they might have been bored at previous past events…
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What does success look like? There’s a huge amount of psychological research which shows how humans perform better with a clear and compelling picture of what they are trying to achieve. In my experience, however, most leaders give far more attention to ‘clear’ and much less to ‘compelling’. Even worse, in their efforts to serve many different purposes, the terminology introduces complexity and confusion which actively reduce performance. Unravelling this is made more difficult by the fact that each organisation (and sometimes each person) use the many terms in different ways. In describing the terms below, therefore, my intention is not to give a definitive meaning to each but rather is to explain the differences and problems that can arise. So many terms… Budgets These are the probably the simplest, and certainly the most common, but are also the most overused. Every organisation needs budget figures to define the minimum acceptable level of performance – particularly for helping to communicate likely outcomes to financial stakeholders (owners, shareholders etc).
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Most members of leadership teams would recognise the conflict and ineffectiveness that arises from members pulling in different directions. Team alignment is much discussed but few leaders agree exactly what it means, let alone know how to achieve it. It’s simpler than you might think and this article shows how. Alignment – the Holy Grail for leadership teams? Every leader I have met would recognise this image as a representation of a team who are working to different agendas and looking to different goals. Enormous energy is wasted by all of the members of these teams in understanding and reconciling the different positions, and by the leader in particular. Even when the competing viewpoints are brought together the discussions and decisions that ensue are usually poor and badly implemented. These compromises take two forms:- In order to gain agreement, a ‘lowest common denominator’ compromise is reached. Everyone knows that it’s a sub optimal answer but also accepts that it’s the best that
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In my career as a leader, and latterly as a consultant, I have sat in on a huge number of Leadership Team meetings. Some are better and others worse but, overall, the standard of them is surprisingly poor. Over ambitious agendas, rambling updates, visibly disengaged participants and, most importantly, superficial discussion that don’t seem to be getting to the heart of the issue are the norm. Given the calibre of the people in the room, how can this be? Why do we put up with such poor meetings – and how can we change them? The evils of the ‘Update’ Leadership Teams are comprised of human beings and are just as susceptible to falling into bad habits. These habits are a big part of the reason why groups of talented and experienced people keep doing things that clearly aren’t working. They just aren’t getting the most out of the enormous resources of knowledge and experience in the room when the Leadership Team gets together. The most pernicious of these habits
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We’ve all been members of teams that don’t work well. We know that the impact on the results of the organisation is serious – and that it’s not getting the best out of us or those around us.
Most of us have been members of more effective teams. We have first hand experience of how much more enjoyable and productive they can be.
We know that the prize for increasing team effectiveness is one of the biggest opportunities available to us.
Why, then, are so few teams acting to make things better? Our research suggests that only 1 in 8 teams have made a serious attempt to improve team effectiveness.
If this sounds like your team, what part are you playing in keeping the team where it is? And how could you change things to move it forward?
The most important reason for this apparent contradiction lies in the psyche of each and every one of us.
I never contradict myself – er wait, yes I do
Human beings struggle to
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We all know that change is central to successful leadership and it’s now part of every training and development programme. Why then, are we so inexpert at it? Why does some change seem to happen almost spontaneously – and other efforts seem to fail no matter how hard we try? Everything is connected One of the most important social scientists of the last 50 years was Gregory Bateson. A brilliant, multi disciplinary scholar and practitioner, he brought together ideas from many areas to help him understand the relationships he observed in societies and communities. At the heart of his work were his observations about the circular effect of behaviour in the relationships between people. He coined the term ‘vicious circle’ and he was one of the first to study and explain how the way we behave can be amplified (sometimes exponentially) or dampened by the behaviour of someone we are interacting with. He extended these ideas from pairs to groups of people and then to the interaction of people within the
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