You Need a Breakthrough Leadership Team
The following was adapted from Breakthrough Leadership Team by Mike Goldman.
Think of your company as a human body. If the heart is weak and not pumping blood sufficiently, the body falls apart. Extremities go numb. Organs start to shut down. You can put the patient on dialysis to help the kidneys or use physical therapy to strengthen their arms or legs, but if the blood flow from the heart is sluggish or inconsistent, you can’t thrive. The best way to get healthy and feel energetic again is to strengthen the heart.
Your leadership team is the heart of your company.
I’ve been a business coach and consultant for thirty years and have found that improving leadership teams is the most effective way to bring my clients lasting success.
My core purpose is to help as many people as possible feel fulfilled by their work. I work with leadership teams to create great companies that provide amazing work environments and exciting opportunities for growth.
If your leadership team is weak — if its members are overwhelmed, for instance, or not skilled enough to bring fresh ideas that keep your company growing — the problems will spread throughout your organization. If the people on your leadership team aren’t working together, the people beneath them won’t work together. If the members of your leadership team don’t hold themselves accountable, the people who report to them won’t hold themselves accountable. If the leadership team is more concerned about individual goals than they are about the team’s goals and the company’s overarching goals, then the rest of your company will be similarly fractured, and growth and revenue will stall.
Your leadership team isn’t just the heart of your company; it’s also the soul. A great company with a strong leadership team has a conscience. It’s adding value to society. It’s solving a problem, addressing a need, or working actively to help its customers do that. Great companies have a sense of purpose that goes beyond profit; they help make the world a better place.
I’ve learned that the central problem for most struggling companies is their leadership team. As the leadership team goes, so goes the organization. If you don’t have a strong leadership team — if you don’t have the right people, culture, and processes in place — the company will not grow in a healthy, sustainable way. It will not be the kind of place employees love to work.
Business leaders, too often, focus on the symptoms of problems within their company. Sales are down, so they concentrate on sales. Leads are declining, so they turn their attention to marketing. But if CEOs and other business leaders focused instead on improving their leadership team, they would see ten times the value. More importantly, they would see sustained, long-term value. CEOs can either examine and treat individual organs of their company, or they can work on strengthening the heart — the leadership team — so it can take care of all the other problems at the same time.
Studies show that the main reason a strategic initiative fails is a lack of leadership buy-in and support, lending more evidence to the importance of a strong leadership team.
Leaders with a good business idea think they can white-knuckle it and make things happen. That’s how many business leaders become successful in the first place. They launch a successful company through unglamorous, difficult work, but as that company grows, long hours and personal commitment aren’t enough to keep the company moving forward. The leader needs help, and in desperation, they hire quickly and wind up with a mediocre team that is unable to scale with the company.
Instead, leaders need to recruit talented individuals who believe in the company’s purpose and already live the company’s core values. They need to define the culture of their company, execute with discipline, and continually work to develop and improve the team. They need to create a Breakthrough Leadership Team.
To learn more about creating a leadership team at your company, you can find Breakthrough Leadership Team on Amazon.
MIKE GOLDMAN is a nationally recognized speaker, author, coach, and expert on building breakthrough leadership teams. Mike has nearly thirty years of experience coaching and consulting, the first half of which he spent at Accenture and Deloitte working with Fortune 500 companies like Disney, Verizon, and Chanel. He founded Performance Breakthrough in 2007 and now works to develop leadership teams in mid-sized companies, giving him firsthand knowledge of what works and what doesn’t across various industries. His first book, Performance Breakthrough: The Four Secrets of Passionate Organizations, has helped business leaders create caring, productive, and profitable organizations. Mike lives in New Jersey with his wife and has two children.
