The quality of teamwork achieved by an executive team has an enormous impact on business success. So it makes sense to invest in coaching the team to be healthy and high performing. In this two-episode special, Gerard shares stories and insights into some of the reasons why executive teams need help, and ways in which leadership teams can conquer dysfunction and achieve higher levels of success.
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1. Tweet us @XtraordinaryLe2
2. Follow us on Instagram @xtraordinary_leaders
3. Email us at interact@xtraordinaryleaders.com.au
4. Check out our website for more info Home | Xtraordinary Leaders
Take Care, Lead Well.
The quality of teamwork achieved by an executive team has an enormous impact on business success. So it makes sense to invest in coaching the team to be healthy and high performing. In this two-episode special, Gerard shares stories and insights into some of the reasons why executive teams need help, and ways in which leadership teams can conquer dysfunction and achieve higher levels of success.
Contact Xtraordinary Leaders
1. Tweet us @XtraordinaryLe2
2. Follow us on Instagram @xtraordinary_leaders
3. Email us at interact@xtraordinaryleaders.com.au
4. Check out our website for more info Home | Xtraordinary Leaders
Take Care, Lead Well.
It's not about the ordinary.
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We've got enough of that. It's about what's running the extraordinary.
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And we need more.
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Hi there. I'm Gerard Penna.
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And welcome to the extraordinary latest podcast, where we spend time with recognised leaders and global experts exploring the art and science of remarkable leadership.
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Come back to the Extraordinary Leaders podcast. My name is Gerard Penna and I'm your host. It's been a little bit slow on the podcast front this year. I normally would be producing a podcast more regularly. Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on how you look at it. I've actually been slow on the podcast because I've been quite busy with clients. In fact, a large amount of my work has been leadership team coaching. Some examples would include technology leadership team in entertainment company that's betting on technology to underpin their digital future.
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Another example would be a finance leadership team in organization, which has grown significantly as the result of a major acquisition, which has seen them go from being a national organization to now being a global one with much greater scale and complexity and challenge for the finance leadership team that I'm working with. And I've also been working with an executive team of an online retailer who have just changed CEOs in what is becoming a more challenging market.
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And these are some examples of the teams that I've been working with and probably illustrative of the context and the situations and the reasons why I'm approached to work with leadership teams. The circumstances of each team are unique. They often multifaceted, many and varied. Sometimes the team is dysfunctional and seemingly broken, and that's holding them back from performance and results. Sometimes the team is just getting started and they want to create the foundations for high performance.
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And sometimes they aspire to make the journey from good to great. They are doing just fine, but they know that they could do more and be more and be even more successful if they could improve their team work. And then there's times where the team is having to lead in a less generous environment and then needing to pull together to succeed. The conditions are just getting much harder for them and they can only do that by working together.
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The benefits of doing the work and making progress are always substantial, though no top teams exist at that intersection point of three critical elements for organizational performance. So their strategy, culture and leadership.
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And as a result, inevitably. Careful and impactful development work with the executive team yields advances in these three elements and consequently performance.
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As a result, when I'm asked about my approach to coaching leadership teams, it can be difficult to formulate a neat or a simple answer. I've found over the last couple of decades of working with leaders and teams that there's no singularly right way of doing it. No simple six steps or cookie cutter answer. Instead, I've found that it's much more useful to evolve a set of rules or principles that inform my approach a set of practices or techniques that I can use adaptively to generate the best results with my clients, whether they're global businesses or their national sporting codes or not for profit agencies.
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So as Jordan Peterson wrote a book, 12 Rules for Life, this and the following episode present 12 Rules for Coaching Leadership Teams. Some of what I have learned and am still learning when I work with them.
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Hang around. It's going to be a great episode.
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So here are rules 1 to 6 of the 12 rules for coaching leadership teams. Rule number one. Lead the team from where they are. To effectively mobilize others to do difficult work. And make no mistake. Team development can be very challenging work for the team members. You need to understand where they are. Understanding and connecting with their perspectives, their beliefs, their fears and their anxieties is essential if I'm going to influence them to do what needs to be done.
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In this way. It is very much the work of leadership. If leadership is about influencing and mobilizing others to do what needs to be done because they want to do it.
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I have to connect to where they're at. I have to understand what hopes and dreams and aspirations will pull them forward, as well as what fears and anxieties or worries or concerns could hold them back. And I need to do that work at an individual level as much as a group level. This means I normally need to engage in a mixture of interviews or surveys and team observations before we even get started as a team. Before we would have the first offsite or the first group conversation.
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And that helps me understand what is the departure point for that team journey and for all of the members of those teams. So my work will be coaching and influencing not just the collective but the individuals that are in the group. And in this way the coaching of leadership teams reflects the similar dynamic to coaching any team. So those of you who are out there who have your own team, it's paying attention to both the individual needs.
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The individual wants the individual motivations, how individuals are showing up as well as the team dynamics, the interplay, the relationships, the interchanges and the exchanges between people and how that then impacts their ability collectively and individually to be successful. So that's rule number one. Lead the team from where they are.
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Rule number two follows on from rule number one. Rule number two is lead the team towards where they want to be. Teams are often right for coaching when a particular condition exists, and that is that they have a vision for themselves and their organizations that they're struggling to achieve on their own, or they find themselves fracturing because they don't have a shared vision or a purpose that orients and binds them together. In either case, it's the vision that shared collective vision or that purpose that has the gravity that can hold them together, forms the destination, pulls them towards where they need to get to, and that's the basis of engaging with the development journey.
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It's the fuel. It's the reason to want to do the work, to change the behaviours and the dynamics or the ways in which they're contributing to the team outcomes. And when there is a big enough purpose or a big enough vision that they care about enough, it can pull them forward and help overcome any of the barriers that have been getting in the way. In truth, it's usually the only durable reason for doing the tough team development work that sometimes required. There's an example of this that I experienced a few years ago which illustrated just how powerful this is, particularly and even when.
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It's not a group that normally you'd expect to work together, that in fact it might be two tribes, two warring tribes or factions that are really struggling to unite. I worked several years ago with two such groups who were struggling to work together, and there was quite a significant amount of conflict and mistrust and fracturing between the two of them. On one side was Basketball Australia, a board of the governing body for basketball in the country of Australia. They're responsible for our national teams, the boomers and the Opals.
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They're also responsible for providing the sort of the Federation of Services to representing the interests of the state associations. And then there's National Basketball League. The National Basketball League used to be run by Basketball Australia, but for when they got into some commercial and financial difficulty, Basketball Australia sold off the rights to private interests and that private interests was the former owner of Melbourne United Basketball team, a entrepreneur by the name of Larry Kesselman.
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Larry Kestleman had made his fortune. Founding and then later selling dodo Internet. Most people know very well, as well as having quite a significant property development business and is now a billionaire. And Larry bought the rights into perpetuity for the National Basketball League. So you have this situation where the National Basketball League operates within the ecosystem of basketball in Australia and for the most for the average punter out there, they wouldn't see it as being separate to the kind of normal machinations and structures.
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However, National Basketball League was an independent league run by a privately owned enterprise operating within an ecosystem that is run by a governing body made up of largely volunteers. And because of the history and because of the different orientations of those two different groups, they were struggling to work together. And I was approached by the chair of Basketball Australia and also then following that by Larry to see whether we could find a way of harmonizing those two groups because they had a lot of mutual interest.
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There was a lot to be gained by finding ways of working together more collaboratively and more productively.
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When I started working with the individuals in that group. And remember, we had about ten people in the room for this first face to face gathering of these warring parties. The first thing I asked them to do was to each individually share why they were there, you know, what was their purpose, what was their aspiration for basketball that they were representing by being there in the room? And we got around the room and listen to every person, share their story, share their deep feelings.
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And there was a whole bunch of different things that was showing up. Different people had different reasons for being there, but their interest in what they wanted to happen going forward was all shared. They all wanted basketball to thrive. They all believe that basketball in Australia had had not yet lived up to its full potential, and the only way that the sport could thrive at a global level or a national level or at a state level is to have a flourishing national basketball league and a flourishing basketball ecosystem. And that their shared purpose, their shared vision for a thriving, flourishing sport.
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Was what bound them together and the realization that the only way that they could achieve that. Was by working together. And whilst we did a number of things to to work on the team dynamics and to build trust and to build connection over time and to build disciplines and improve communication and collaboration, it was that shared vision, that shared purpose, which provided the gravity that held them together. And even when the going got tough to hold them there together in the room. And to act as a team.
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So rule number two, lead the team where they want to be.
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Rule number three. Is the paradox of the I and the US.
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The most important shared realization that the leadership team members must have. Is that when they're working in teams, they are going to be constantly battling to reconcile, to compete, competing human interests. One is that as an individual team member. I'm going to be motivated to generate the maximum benefit for myself at the same time, at the same time as being asked to give up my interests for the benefits of the group. And that, in fact is one of the markers of real teamwork, is when an individual team member is willing to give up something that they value.
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So that it can help the team succeed.
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I was really struck by this and struck by the difference that it can make to a team's ability to achieve so much more. When they can battle through those competing interests of I and us and genuinely become more about the US. When I was working with the Coles supermarket organisation at the beginning of their transformation, so Coles was considered to be one of the most successful corporate or business transformations in Australia. You know, fundamentally a broken business that was distant second to its major competitor, Woolworths, and over a period of several years under the ownership of Wesfarmers and the leadership of Ian McLeod and a very committed board of directors or board of executives went about transforming that organisation into one that was purpose driven, high performing and able to really renovate and transform its relationship with its customers.
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Early on in that turnaround, the organization had been experimenting with in a particular ways of presenting their stores and presenting their merchandise and providing a particular customer experience through a lot of trial or experimental stores. And they finally got to the point where they. Had a formula and they were ready to to replicate that on scale, to start pushing that and rolling that out over a three year period. And it was going to be a fairly significant investment, several billion dollar investment that the. The organization was going to make in its renewal and transformation.
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Yet one of the directors was somewhat concerned about the ability of the organization to pull it off and was sensing that there was some fracturing and silo wisdom and some things that suggested that the organization wouldn't be able to join up in the way that it would need to to actually work together to implement that kind of significant transformation, physical transformation, as well as cultural transformation. And I was asked to come in and evaluate the readiness of the organization to execute on that multi-billion dollar strategy.
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Didn't quite a number of different things. Interviewed a range of people, looked at a number of strategy documents, reviewed a bunch of data before reporting back to the board on their readiness and their likelihood of success in executing this major transformation strategy. The very first thing I shared with the board. This group of executives was that the one thing that was going to hold them back was that they were a team of eight players, but not in a team that each of them had been hired because of their high levels of expertise and competence and experience in their own respective areas, whether it was marketing, marketing or merchandise or or supply chain or operations, and that they each individually.
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Were playing the best game that they could as individuals, yet they weren't operating as a team and everyone else in the organization saw this. And there wasn't. There was an absence. There was an absence of a belief at the levels further below the board that this big joined up, transformative work was not going to be successful because they didn't see it happening amongst the the top team.
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And so it just reminds us that even the most capable and the most competent and the most accomplished people can struggle with this this willingness to work together for the greater good.
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Because they're an incredibly powerful set of opposing forces, the I and the US, and they perfectly explain the dysfunction of many teams and they often remain unexamined in most team dynamics. But if you can draw this challenge to the surface and you can confront it. It will be essential and incredibly helpful for the team to make progress.
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Rule number four. Beware the illusion of the broken team.
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And many people will look in at persistent and seemingly dysfunctional behaviours demonstrated by a leadership team, and they'll declare the team broken.
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I don't consider this a helpful way of thinking, and there's a couple of reasons for that. The first is that every team is a system. It's a dynamic system of beliefs, mindsets, values and behaviours .
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And if you can keep in mind the idea that every system is perfectly designed to produce the results that it gets.
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It therefore stands to reason that if a team system is producing the same results over time, the assumption must be that the results are perfectly acceptable to many of the team members. Otherwise, the system would be designed differently by the team members who are part of it. And surely if the results were satisfactory to the team members. Enough of the team members or even enough of the team members that had the power to change things, surely the team would have changed. But if the team's not changing and it's continuing to produce those same.
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Dysfunctional results or outcomes of dynamics.
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Maybe.
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Rather than thinking about the team as broken. Maybe it's the reality is that the dynamics may in fact be perfectly functional. Given that the results that are produced are acceptable to the team members. I'll give you an example. This is one that shows up quite frequently when working with leadership teams. Others will look into the teams and they'll even look on themselves and they'll say, Well, we're kind of we're quite disconnected. We work in silos. Every team member and their function is doing their own thing.
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And in some ways that could be seen as dysfunctional. Yet, as Robert Frost said, good fences make for good neighbours . When we have clear separation in resources and activities and interests, we can then pursue efficiently and in a focused manner without having to give anything up or negotiate anything. And so for people who are often charged with driving for results and improving efficiency and making things happen and and exercising what we might call leadership.
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That siloism and that fracturing. Is perfectly understandable. It allows them to go about doing their daily work the way they need to. Patrick Lencioni wrote a wonderful book called The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. It's a fable about a leadership team, explains this notion really well when he talks about two different types of teams. He refers to golf teams, which is where each in some versions of playing golf, the individual players in the golf team play their individual rounds of golf, and then they meet together at the end of the day and add up their scores.
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We contrast that to a basketball team. When there's a basketball team, there is only one school and everyone's on the court and flowing in around on the court as well as moving off the court in a sort of interchangeable set of players to make sure that they're actually fielding the best team for that moment against their opposition.
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So working together and the function, the silos and the disconnection that might be seen and sometimes might be perfectly functional for an organization that can achieve its results by working in this disconnected way. Increasingly, though, that's becoming less and less the case as I look at leadership teams because they're having to work together, they're having to work adaptively, they're having to work collaboratively, they're having to work agile in and flow. And join together and cohere to be able to respond to the opportunities and challenges that are being presented to them in their environment.
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The second reason that we need to beware the illusion of the broken team and and remind ourselves that the illusion of the broken team can be an unhelpful way of thinking is that teams are not machines. And because they're not machines, we can't think about them as being broken in that sense of the word. We often approach our design and management of organizations and their subunits as if they are machines that if we put these subunits together in design and in the right way with this structure and these flows, that it will mesh together perfectly.
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And this is a legacy of our industrial age thinking, you know, we act is if we can design and specify work organizations perfectly through those structures and through authorizations and job descriptions and accountabilities, and then expect them to operate as designed in a predictable and linear way as if they are machines. But this is nonsense. Human beings are not machines. We are often unpredictable and we are rarely linear. Human groups and human beings are, by our very nature, organic and imperfect, and we need to be treated and respected as such, overcoming the natural limitations that.
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Stem from being human. You know, the weaknesses and the challenges of being human, as well as embracing all of the wonderful, glorious things that human beings are capable of and compassion and creativity and resolve and resilience and agility. These are all things that we can't access. When we treat teams as if they are like machines.
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Rule number five, the three goals of clarity, alignment and commitment.
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I believe that a leadership team can be an incredibly powerful instrument in binding and holding an organization together. In its pursuit of a shared vision and aspiration. And that organization might be enormous. It might be a function or a part of the organization, or it might be small. But regardless, the leadership team will be a powerful instrument. And in binding and holding that group together, that collective together in the pursuit of a shared vision and an aspiration. But if there's a lack of clarity, alignment and commitment amongst the top team.
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Two.
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Some shared vision and aspiration and a connected set of goals and objectives and priorities that stem from that. Then what will happen is we're diminishing the strength of the glue that binds the organization.
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And the organization then becomes challenged in its ability to relentlessly pursue.
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Its purpose and execute its plan in a disciplined fashion.
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In the absence of that shared clarity, alignment and commitment amongst the leadership team, you're almost guaranteed to see a type of attention deficit disorder. You know where because each member of the team is interested in different things, whether their pet projects or particular outcomes and less interested in others, then they're going to be pursuing their own interests, not those that have been. Debated and agreed and committed to by the leadership team a finite number of things.
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Know, absolute clarity and commitment to the few things that we are going to do and we're going to be and what we're going to go after. Instead, they they're they're attention deficit disorder. Distributes their attention, their attentional capital, their ability to pay attention to things across to many priorities, across to many activities, across to many outcomes.
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And the other.
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Product of a lack of clarity, alignment, commitment will be solid with them. It will be that fracturing and solid rhythm and disconnection that I spoke about earlier on, and that'll get in the way of the different parts of the organization being able to work together either as an effective value chain or collaboratively to take advantage of the opportunities and respond to the challenges that that might be presenting to them, or even just come together and work around providing a, you know, a singularly amazing customer experience, for example, and what that siloism will do and the attention deficit disorder will it'll erode focus and it'll erode value and it'll diminish result.
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And I want to draw particular attention to sort of the importance of commitment, because often what we assume is that as a leadership team or a team has a conversation about something, and you've probably been in this situation yourself where you've talked about things, the assumption is that if you've talked about them and debated them sufficiently at length that there will be a commitment. But that's actually often not the case. I was working with a very large mining organization, with the leadership group that was responsible for their Australian operations. And there was probably about 16 people in the room and they had a new a new head of the the business in Australia who had taken up this leadership, their their role at the beginning of a really difficult period for the organisation.
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The market conditions had turned. It was quite a hostile environment they were in and they were having to to drive much higher levels of performance to be able to ensure that the business was sort of financially sustainable. And this senior leader was attempting to to galvanize and to cohere this group of large group of very senior, experienced leaders together. And we had facilitated a day of deep discussion and real connection and fierce debate about what was important and why it was important, and constructing a very clear sense of what's our shared vision and our shared purpose, and how do we need to make a contribution to it, and what will be the few things that will make a difference for us to be able to achieve that? And normally what I would do is at the end of a workshop, I would get around to every single person in the room and ask them to look at all of their colleagues and indicate whether they were prepared to commit to what had been agreed and discuss that day, because we'd been quite a big agenda that day and it had been a very large number of people in the room.
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I didn't do that. It was a failure on my behalf, and if I had of, I would have picked up something that I only picked up by chance that evening in the hotel. I'd set down for dinner in the in the hotel restaurant, and I noticed that at the table near me were four of the senior leaders who were also staying in that hotel, who'd been in the workshop with me that day. And amongst those four were one in particular who was responsible for the largest part of that business. And he had a significant reputation.
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And and. And they notice me over there and we kind of started talking and then they invited me to sit with them for a while. And we had a conversation about a range of things, and then we got to talking about the workshop that day, and we eventually ended up talking about the senior executive that they now reported to.
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And. I asked the.
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That senior leader at the table.
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What they were thinking. And he shared something that he hadn't in the workshop, and that was he wasn't quite sure that he could back this. He wasn't quite sure that he could back this executive, that he could back this plan. And my comment to him was that if you're unable to commit. You need to declare that openly because otherwise you are going to hold everyone else back. And you need to pretty much decide whether you're on board or you're not. And if you're on board, get on board.
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And if you're not, get out of the way and allow someone else to be on board.
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Fortunately, I heard through feedback and later workshops and comments from other people who worked with that individual. He took that. And he ran with it. He made a decision that he couldn't get on board with this. It was going to come at too great a sacrifice for him. So he negotiated to to move to a different role in the organization, and that allowed someone to get on the team who was prepared to commit to what the team had decided.
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But these this is a really good example of how dysfunction can occur when with a lack of shared clarity, alignment or commitment. And it needs to be addressed directly and candidly, I think, in the team setting, if the team's really going to be able to get after and succeed in achieving what it decides is most important.
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And rule number six for coaching leadership teams. Behavior breeds behavior.
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In any social system, including that of wolves, chimpanzees and human beings. There's always an authority structure, there's always a hierarchy. And in these systems, those with less power in the hierarchy respond to the actions of those who have more. You know, they pay much more attention to the behavior of their superiors and they watch them carefully for the clues as to the norms of the group or the way that we do things around here. And organizations and teams are no different. The behavior of the leadership team is always under constant scrutiny by others, and it sets the cultural tempo for the rest of the organization.
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I'm regularly invited to speak to leadership teams who often will describe their situation is that they they don't quite have the culture or the behavior in their organization that is allowing them to succeed in a more challenging environment. Maybe they've been disrupted by some competitor or the market conditions have just generally become much more hostile and they need people in their organization to be more proactive and more courageous and more innovative and and to go beyond just doing what they're told.
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And one of the questions I often ask these senior leaders is, tell me about the kind of people that you hire. What do you look for in people? What are the kind of characteristics and attributes that you hire for? And they will often talk about things like they will hire for people who are innovative and courageous and proactive and action oriented and use their initiative.
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And my next question is, and do you think you're reasonably successful in in recruiting and hiring those people? And they say generally, yes.
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And so I ask, well, what did you do to them?
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Because the only thing that could possibly explain.
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Why? Proactive.
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Initiative laden. Innovative. Generally courageous. Smart people come into an organization and then start displaying behaviors which are not at all consistent with that. The only assumption that you can make is that the organization, culture or context did something to them. And in my experience, it's normally the senior leadership team are ultimately responsible for that. You don't need to run a deep diagnostic survey right across the organization to understand the likely culture that exists further into the organization or you sometimes need to do is just look at the behavior of the top team.
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And the research.
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Clearly shows that top team cohesion and functionality has a significant impact on employees and culture. We're executive leadership teams are fractured or siloed or dysfunctional. It creates an organizational climate in the organization that's disengaging and demotivating, and that usually results in higher turnover and intention to resign amongst employees.
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The relationship between executive team function or perhaps you might call it dysfunction. And employee engagement has long been suspected, suspected and for me anecdotally observed over time. There was a recent study, however, that. Showed it to be absolutely true. And this was a study that had an enormous sample size of 96 organizations, 305 leadership team members and over 10,000 employees. And the research showed.
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That there was a material relationship between the behaviour of the leadership team and the impact on employee engagement right through the organization. The researchers actually used the word toxic, toxic to describe the organizational climate that poor top team cohesion created. And they noted that where the top team displayed a lack of true teamwork and shared commitment, there was a measurable increase in the number of occurrences of employees questioning why they were doing what they were doing in that organization.
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You know, the number of employees that would criticize the organization's goals or the number of employees who would resist new organizational strategies or even go about undermining their co-workers. So these findings only reinforce what's at stake for my clients who are working on their top team effectiveness. The shadow that they are casting collectively is far reaching and powerful. But if you're not a member of a top team, though, and we're not talking necessarily about a top leadership team, but let's say we're talking about a leadership team further into the organization.
00:33:55:22 - 00:34:00:17>
Don't think that you're off the hook. If you work.
00:34:01:16 - 00:34:02:19>
You know, in a.
00:34:03:10 - 00:34:34:15>
If you work at a level in which you're not in the top team, but in the top team hasn't yet got a shit together. You can still play a critical part in minimizing the negative effects on the team below you. So the research shows that where middle managers display transformational leadership behaviors, that's things like leading from vision, connecting to purpose, empowering people and so on. The negative effects of the top team will be reduced by approximately 40%. In other words, you can act as the linchpin that holds it together so that the employees can engage and mobilize while still staying in the organization.
00:34:35:20 - 00:34:53:16>
So what you do with your colleagues at your level? It really answers the question that I'm often asked by middle managers who are undertaking leadership development training when they say, why should we do this? You know, lead better if they and they're talking to them about the managers above if they aren't.
00:34:54:12 - 00:34:55:25>
And it simply because.
00:34:55:25 - 00:35:04:04>
If you do. It will make a major difference to the lived experience and motivation of your teams and and employees nonetheless.
00:35:09:10 - 00:35:42:02>
I hope that you've found these first six rules of the 12 rules for coaching leadership teams helpful. I'm conscious. I'm conscious that for a lot of people, unless you're in a leadership team and you're part of one of these processes, you'll have no way of knowing what actually goes on within in those teams. If you're not in their meetings, if you're not in their interactions, and certainly if you're not in their team development workshops, you won't know what they're being asked to pay attention to or what it is that they're doing, which is helping or hindering their effectiveness or their success.
00:35:42:07 - 00:36:15:27>
So in many ways, I hope that at a minimum that this has given you some insight into what really goes on and reveals for you that leadership teams and leadership team dynamics are very human. They're there. They're these are the natural sorts of things that evolve. And teams need to be disciplined and focused about doing the work if they're going to reach high performance. And the stakes are high. You know, the kinds of challenges their organizations and their teams are facing into and the opportunities that pursuing require leadership teams to not just be be good, but to actually be something more than that.
00:36:16:08 - 00:36:53:14>
And I'm looking forward to, in the next episode, sharing with you rules 7 to 12 of the 12 rules for coaching Leadership teams. In the meantime, if you've got any feedback or any comments, please feel free to reach out to me at Jerod at extraordinary leaders.com. Remember that's extraordinary without a knee or alternatively you can make a comment on our Facebook page or on our LinkedIn page or even via our website extraordinary leaders.com. But in the meantime I look forward to sharing with you the next episode and wish you all the very best with your leadership.
00:36:53:27 - 00:36:55:12>
Take care. Lead well.