What does a healthy Leadership Team look like?
We know that the Leadership or Management at an organization is key. We need it to be the very best, so that the organization can grow, evolve, engage, succeed… When that Leadership is not at its best, the most likely result is that it will fail miserably, in whichever way (maybe it’s results, perhaps communication or it could be relations).
In my short life I had been part of two very different leadership teams, at two very alike organizations. Here’s what I’ve learnt.
Organizational culture is not everything
In a previous story, that I wrote for Rodati Stories, I spoke about the importance of owning your company culture and how it’s pretty much the foundation for everything else. Don’t get me wrong, I still believe that. But, although company culture can save you from many, many issues, I know for a fact that owning the culture is not the only ingredient necessary.
I had the luck and the pleasure of working in two organizations that really owned their cultures and, honestly, had done a great work with them. Let’s call them Company X and Company Y. At both, every employee was a cultural fit and the Leadership was no exception.
At Company X, the leadership was a team of very different personalities, who managed to stay together and be successful for a long time. At Company Y, the leadership team was a group of very different personalities who didn’t make it a whole year together and accomplished far less than their potential would have permitted.
When I look back and see the cultural resemblance of both companies, it’s hard to believe that they had such different developments. That’s when I discovered that culture couldn’t be the answer.
Conflict is good
As any other management team, both Company X’s and Company Y’s teams held periodic meetings to align, keep up with each other’s work, solve some issues that may have emerged, etc.
Only that, when I worked at Company X, meetings usually had an agenda and clear outcomes, after some time addressing the issues and sometimes even entering in heated debates that then would continue for days. But when I worked at Company Y, we didn’t care much about the agenda, people would barely discuss the topics and it was more like seven monologues than a debate. I often left those loooong meetings (they took 3 or 4 hours) with little purpose or vision, and every week I started to thread them more and more.
Contrary to what most people would think, I’ve come to realize that meetings without conflict are (90% of the time) useless. If topics aren’t being questioned and debated, this is usually a sign that meetings are pointless and people couldn’t care less (needless to say, you won’t achieve much). This is something that not many know and happens at organizations all over the world. Patrick Lencioni puts it really well on his book, Death by Meeting.
Self awareness and trust make a team
This, I believe, is the most important lesson I took from these two experiences.
Knowing who you, and the other members of the team, are and what you bring to the table (with virtues and flaws), will allow you to grow from your strengths and pay extra attention to the weak spots. It will allow you to know what the team is lacking, why others act or work in a certain way, and also team up together those who complement their personalities.
There are several personality tests that can show you the different assets of your team, but that will not do unless there is true trust among the members of the team. It doesn’t matter if you know that the CFO has more of an “explorer” personality than a “completer” one, if you don’t trust that the people who have to perform the job will do their best, you will keep worrying and take extra measures to make sure things happen, which will make you lose focus and eventually will dissolve the team, and the results with it.
Being part of a Management Team is hard work, let alone lead one. But if the team is a healthy team, it can take you a long way.
