Saying No to Drama, Disorder, and Failure: Creating a Great Leadership Team
Building a Great Leadership Team: Part III
This is part three of a three-part series. You can read parts one and two here:
Conscious, Connected, Effective: How to Build Great Leadership Teams
Drama, Disorder, and Disintegration: The Many Faces of Dysfunctional Leadership Teams
Recap
In part one, I shared a tale of two leadership teams and defined Conscious, Connected, and Effective.
Conscious = to be here, now, in a non-triggered, non-reactive state. Unconscious teams experience drama.
Connected = to be communicative and known. Disconnected teams experience disorder.
Effective = to be successful in producing a desired or intended result. Ineffective teams experience failure.
In part two, I shared the many permutations of dysfunctional leadership teams, summarized in the graphic below.
I discussed what it felt like to be on or under each of these dysfunctional teams. With this information, you’ve become a pro at identifying dysfunctional leadership teams past, present, and future.
All caught up? Great. Let’s get to the fun stuff: how to improve.
Getting Started
Let’s assume that you’re bought in. You want to create a Conscious, Connected, and Effective leadership team. You’ve done the work to identify your team’s permutation of dysfunction, and you’re ready to start making things better.
A word of warning before you dive in:
Improving these things takes time. I wouldn’t advise forwarding this article to your team and saying “I want a report on how we’re going to improve all of these on my desk by next week!”
If you want to maximize your odds of success, you’re going to want to do some pre-work. First, some solo work to get clarity on the change you seek. Then, some group work to generate buy-in.
For solo pre-work, get clear on the following:
What do you see as the biggest opportunity area for your team?
Why do you see that as the biggest opportunity area?
What is it about how things currently are that makes you believe that?
What is the positive vision you see for your team were you to improve it?
How am I responsible for our team being this way? (More on responsibility below)
How is it true that I am being unconscious, disconnected, or ineffective?
How I am co-creating that with the team?
How can I take responsibility for it?
Once you have a clear vision and have taken personal responsibility, bring it to your team for buy-in.
Buy-in is all about getting on the same page. Does your team agree with what you’re seeing or see something else? Can they get enrolled and excited about your vision for what’s possible? Or is there another core focus of work and vision that you can co-create?
Take your time here. Co-creating a vision of possibility pays compounding dividends when the time comes to take action. When everyone’s on the same page, your team can move in lockstep to improve.
Working on Consciousness
Despite being first on the list, improving consciousness is the most involved of the three. Fortunately, it’s also a catalyst for improving connection and effectiveness. Being conscious involves facing and speaking the truth, and that usually brings disconnection and ineffectiveness out into the light to be worked on.
When you set out to help you and your team be more conscious, you’re stepping into a long journey. It’s rewarding and unlocks great energy. And it also never really ends.
Begin your journey by reading The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership.
Focus on chapters 1-6 specifically. These are the commitments designed to end drama. They correlate with the six bullet points in the Conscious/Unconscious Leadership Team in part one.
If you’re still energized and happen to have a budget, I suggest you bring in support. Getting more conscious can be a challenging process, and having an experienced practitioner helps. You can reach out to me directly (I’m training in CLGs coaching method) or to the Conscious Leadership Group.
If you’d like to continue on your own, I recommend starting with commitments (bullet points) one and six:
Identifying blame and shifting to a culture of 100% responsibility
Identifying areas where you lack clear agreements and accountability and creating a culture of impeccable agreements
Creating a Culture of 100% Responsibility
To shift to a culture of responsibility, you first have to:
Get clear on what 100% responsibility means
Identify where in your culture you’re blaming and not taking 100% responsibility.
To understand what I mean when I say 100% responsibility, watch this video.
When you’re clear on what 100% responsibility means, start noticing where your team is blaming rather than taking 100% responsibility.
This includes straightforward blaming (it’s your/my fault), as well as behaviors that look like intelligent analysis but are really sophisticated blame. This shows up as questions like:
Who did it?
Why did it happen? What is the root cause?
How did it happen?
Who messed up?
Who’s going to fix it?
While this root cause analysis is helpful for understanding, it often happens with the covert motivation of identifying who to blame.
In cultures dedicated to 100% responsibility, you’ll hear questions like:
Am I willing to take 100% responsibility for this situation? What does that look like?
What can I learn from this situation?
When I blame, what am I distracting myself from knowing or doing?
Am I willing to see myself as empowered?
To begin your journey to 100% responsibility, simply notice the areas where you and your team blame and those areas where you take responsibility. Check in with your team and see if they agree. Then discuss if ending blame and shifting to 100% responsibility is for you. PS: If you’re not clear on what that means, watch the dman video!
If it’s a yes, get started by building a habit of asking the 100% responsibility questions above.
Creating a Culture of Impeccable Agreements
Sloppy agreements are an all-too-common hindrance for leadership teams. Sloppy agreements—those without clear owners, due dates, and measurable tasks—lead to confusion, disagreement, and leaking energy.
As a first step, you and your team need to learn to make impeccable, clear agreements.
A clear agreement is an agreement with a measurable “what” to be done, a clear “who” that owns the doing, and a by “when” for completion.
At first this may seem overbearing and unnecessary. Play with it. Many teams discover that this is just a story and that, in reality, a great deal of energy is unlocked once they get over the initial hump.
As your team gets into the habit of making clear agreements, you’ll notice that sometimes agreements aren’t kept. Account for this. When you sense that you can’t keep an agreement, own up to it as soon as you realize, and proactively renegotiate the “who”, “what”, or “by when” of the agreement.
In the event that an agreement is broken, own it and see if trust was broken and how you might restore it.
To benchmark, know that conscious teams tend to keep their agreements 90% of the time, and renegotiate or miss only 10% of the time.
If the only action you take from this series is to develop the habit of consistently making clear agreements, it will likely cause a significant leap in performance and reduction in drama for your team.
If you want to dig in further, checkout the conscious leadership group’s additional resources for Creating Clear Agreements.
Working on Connection
To become more connected, your team must work on both communication and getting to know each other at a deeper level.
Communication
For communication, a simple and habitual audit goes a long way. Ask questions like:
Make this a regular practice. Teams I know who do this exceptionally well create a specific time and space to reflect on these questions, in particular, “What are we not talking about that we should be?”
Knowing Each other Deeply
Once again, a simple audit goes a long way:
You may find a lot of yeses or a lot of nos here. Again, start slow. Begin with things that feel more tactical and relevant to work (strengths/weaknesses, likes/dislikes, motivations, ways to share if your personal life is affecting work) before attempting to dive into anything personal. You may find that’s enough.
If you do have an appetite for more personal knowing, don’t force it. Allow it to happen at its own pace.
You may encounter people who believe that personal lives and selves don’t belong at work. They’ll be resistant to becoming more deeply known to each other.
The advice is the same. Take your time. Get them bought in on the tactical aspects of connection: “Isn’t it helpful to know if somebody’s performance is compromised by something in their personal life? Isn’t is helpful to know one another’s motivations, so we best know how to motivate each other? Isn’t it helpful to know each other’s strengths and weaknesses so we best know how to collaborate?”
Be willing to run an experiment and make a final decision based on the results. More deeply known teams almost always operate more smoothly. Let the results do the talking.
Working on Effectiveness
Working on effectiveness is simple but difficult. To begin, take an audit:
Think of these steps like a funnel. When a step breaks down, all of the sequential steps usually do too.
Audit for your team as a whole first and see what that gets you. If you find there are still challenges, audit for each leader and their department. Effectiveness varies across a team. You’ll likely find that some of the team is effective, while the rest of the team struggles in different ways.
Once you’ve audited, identify where the breakdown is and get to work. Talk to your team about what you’re seeing and if they agree. Alignment will be essential to creating change.
Once you’re aligned, the work is simple:
Not setting goals? Set them.
Goals not clear to everyone? Clarify them.
Goals not inline with what needs to be done? Adjust them.
Losing focus? Implement checks and systems for staying focused.
Not holding each other accountable? Add accountability into your meetings and processes.
As you begin to make changes, don’t be surprised if you encounter resistance. Effectiveness often breaks down because of internal resistance that lives inside the individual. A person may be afraid to set goals, be held accountable, or struggle to stay focused and be too afraid to admit it.
Take your time with it. Give yourself time to see how the breakdown is getting created and the support that is required to change it. With any big changes like this, patience is key.
Wrapping Up
Welcome to a new paradigm of leadership.
It’s hard work to create a great leadership team. And ultimately worth it.
If you have thoughts, questions, or are interested in getting help with this work, please let me know.
If you’d like to self-serve, explore the challenge below.
And if you set out on the path, know it will be worth it.
Cheers,
-J
P.S.
If you’re interested in creating a more conscious, connected, and effective leadership team, I’m here to help.
I support leadership teams in becoming more conscious, connected, and effective through 1-on-1 coaching and facilitating experiential workshops that transform team consciousness, connection, and effectiveness in days instead of quarters.
If you’re interested, reach out.
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