Building Teams

I just finished reading The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. I didn’t necessarily read this book because I have or want a dysfunctional team. I read it because I want to work with a high functioning team! This book tells the story of a new CEO (Kathryn) and how she deals with a new team she inherits. The author (Lencioni) uses his third person storytelling style to let you hear and understand what the CEO is thinking as she encounters a variety of situations with her senior team.

The following list outlines the Five Dysfunctions along with my further description of each:

Dysfunction #1: Absence of Trust
Fear of being vulnerable with team members prevents the building of trust on a team. (JB: This dysfunction is most noticeable when you encounter teams who won’t let each other see they don’t know everything. Teams like this don’t openly admit their limitations to each other and don’t ask each other for feedback so they can grow. Teams without trust don’t like to spend time together.)

Dysfunction #2: Fear of Conflict
The desire to preserve artificial harmony stifles the occurrence of productive ideological conflict. (JB: Teams with this condition just go along with each other to get back to their own areas of concentration. They don’t care to know enough about each other’s areas to criticize or offer improvement strategies. )

Dysfunction #3: Lack of Commitment
The lack of clarity or buy-in prevents team members from making decisions they will stick to. (JB: This dysfunction results in stripping confidence out of a team. It creates an atmosphere where everyone second-guesses everyone else.)

Dysfunction #4: Avoidance of Accountability
The need to avoid interpersonal discomfort prevents team members from holding one another accountable. (JB: This one is tough because it is about everyone on the team knowing what the organizational goals are, and holding each other accountable for the quality and timeliness of deliverables.)

Dysfunction #5: Inattention to Results
The pursuit of individual goals and personal status erodes the focus on collective results. (JB: This dysfunction shows up when team members care more about their own individual goals than those of the entire enterprise. It encourages people to think only of themselves and their own career advancement.)

After learning about these dysfunctions, I did a search to see what else I could find out about developing a functioning team and found another Lencioni book, The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps EverythingElse in Business and found a reference for leaders that basically summarizes two main points : 1) Build your team (see the Five Dysfunctions), and 2) Set clear organizational goals and hold everyone accountable to stick by them!

My one, big take away from this week’s episode on my leadership path is that clear goals are really essential, because even with a high performing team, if you don’t have clear goals you can still risk squandering valuable human resources and talent. And you know what? The “good ones” won’t stick around if you can’t articulate your goals clearly and hold everyone to be accountable for them.

Have a great week, everyone! Be the leader you want to have!!

First Followers

I learned a new term just a few days ago:  first followers.  A fantastic leader and very good friend I work with sent me a link to watch.  She promised me that if I didn’t dismiss the video in the first few seconds, there would be an important message in it for me.  Of course, she knows I’m a “change junkie” and I would have to trust that her instincts were right about this video. 

I watched the video and wondered if the concept of “first follower” it introduces was just a disguise for the term “early adopter” frequently used in change theory.  But in looking up “early adopters” and “first followers” in the change literature, I found it was not possible to compare the two as easily as I expected. 

There’s a lot written on “early adopters” and how they are the first consumers of new technology: 

This is the second fastest category of individuals who adopt an innovation. These individuals have the highest degree of opinion leadership among the other adopter categories. Early adopters are typically younger in age, have a higher social status, have more financial lucidity, advanced education, and are more socially forward than late adopters. More discrete in adoption choices than innovators. Realize judicious choice of adoption will help them maintain central communication position (Rogers 1962 5th ed, p. 283).

But, I couldn’t find much on “first followers”. I realized I had to go back to the source. 

I watched the video again this weekend and found that the video moderator zeroed in on a few very important distinctions, with the first one being the impact the “first follower” has on the leader.  As the story is told, the leader doesn’t stand out by himself (see the video) – in fact, to me, he looks like he might be under the influence but the video moderator says that he looks like “a nut”.  The first follower is really the spark that draws special attention to what the leader is trying to accomplish.  A key learning at this point is that the leader should treat his/her first followers as equals, because alone, the leader is just a “nut”. Recognizing and nurturing your “first follower” is really important.  In fact, the video story says that leadership during change is over-glorified – the real leadership comes from the “first follower(s)” because the main role “first followers” play is teaching others how to follow. 

In our organizations, leaders are continually under pressure to lead change.  In fact, many are assessed and evaluated by their competency to lead and execute change.  Often, a poor change process reflects badly for the leader.  For those of you who may have struggled with the change challenge, try finding your “first followers” and elevate them to a visible level so they can demonstrate how to follow your change to others.  By leveling the hierarchy between the leader or innovator and the first followers, you’ll be comforted to know you aren’t alone.  Sometimes leading change feels like a job for the lone Ranger, but with one or two “first followers” nearby, you don’t have to be alone.  And that, my friends, is a very nice feeling. 

Watch the video now, and see if it changes your ideas on leading change. 

Collective Ambition

Do you work with people who seem to be waiting for their time at the workplace to come to an end, either daily or longer term? Some seem to have a lot of experience, yet they aren’t quite representing your organization’s evolving values and leadership style . You’ll recognize them if they seem to be putting in the hours but lack an obvious key ingredient: ambition.

Other team members may notice and ask themselves why these individuals just keep coming back to work even though their motivation tanked long ago. The sad truth is that the folks I’m talking about have worked hard their whole careers and blazed trails back in the day when they were driven and ambitious. When and why does this change for some individuals, and not for others? A colleague told me this week that she thought it was because folks fitting this profile have stopped leading change. If this true, this is a serious problem – unless ambition can be nurtured or rekindled, what options do you have to deal with these circumstances? A bigger challenge is to consider how to prevent a new regime of employees from running out of ambition - ever.

Let’s pause here for a moment to distinguish between ambition at an individual level and “collective ambition" as described by Ready and Trulove (2011) in their article The Power of Collective Ambition .

What I learned most from the Ready and Truelove article is that one important aspect of “collective ambition” is a clearly defined definition of leadership behavior. Within a frame work of "collective ambition", leadership behavior is defined as how leaders act daily as they implement the organization’s vision and strategies, striving to fulfill the brand promise, and living up to the organization’s values. There’s a problem when some leaders’ ambitions fizzle, or if they are anchored in a past vision and an old set of values.

I suppose the lesson here for all of us is, that individual motivation and ambition is fundamental to creating a "collectively ambitious" work environment. Take the survey in the Ready and Truelove article to see where your organization scores, and then ask others you work with to do so too just out of curiosity to find out if your perspective is more or less optimistic than the collective group.

The article stipulates that an organization’s purpose is the most important of the seven elements of collective ambition, however, we have to remind ourselves that any one of the seven elements on their own, or even in combination with two or three elements won’t yield the same benefit as an integrated approach. In summary and in closing, here are the seven elements necessary to foster "collective ambition":

Purpose: your company’s reason for being; the core mission of the enterprise.

Vision: the position or status your company aspires to achieve within a reasonable time frame.

Targets and milestones: the metrics you use to assess progress toward your vision.

Strategic and operational priorities: the actions you do or do not take in pursuit of your vision.

Brand promise: the commitments you make to stakeholders (customers, communities, investors, employees, regulators, and partners) concerning the experience the company will provide.

Core values: the guiding principles that dictate what you stand for as an organization, in good times and bad.

Leader behaviors: how leaders act on a daily basis as they seek to implement the company’s vision and strategic priorities, strive to fulfill the brand promise, and live up to the values.

I love sports analogies, especially because I love certain sports. I suppose this attraction is due to the entertainment value sports provide, but I also imagine that in some instances, art imitates life and sports stories tell us more about parallel journeys we have in other parts, even in the workplace. Check out this two minute video to see what individual ambition looks like (it gets better after 1:30 minutes). Then imagine if you had a whole team of players with the same attitude, heart, and ambition as individuals, and collectively.

I will leave you with your imagination on that last point. I'll be back next weekend.