THE 3 OBSTACLES INSIDE YOUR TEAM AND HOW BUSINESS LEADERSHIP CAN SOLVE THEM

If you’re feeling worn down and burned out trying to herd the cats on your executive team then stay tuned. 

Hey folks, Doctor Kevin here. In today’s video, we’re going to talk about the three key obstacles to leadership team success and the solution to those obstacles so you can create the most effective leadership team that pulls your organization in an aligned fashion into the future. 

I’ve helped literally hundreds of leadership teams become high-performance teams and I found in my research and in my work that there are really 3 core areas that undermine the success of a leadership team. You probably experienced this on your team as well, these three areas are role clarity, cultural bias, and alignment. 

I wanna break these three down for you, help you understand how they happen, and give you the skills and techniques to be able to drive forward getting these obstacles out of the way. 

Now the first obstacle I see is role clarity. I worked with a team just yesterday and this was one of the biggest issues they were facing. They didn’t have a clear enough delineation of who was doing what. Without that role clarity, what often happens is that individuals will often think the other person is responsible for something that they don’t think they’re responsible for. And I’ve seen this boil down into communication issues and conflict. Simply because of a lack of awareness of what the goals are, who’s doing what, and when. 

Well, first of all, role clarity is the issue. What are the symptoms of that? It looks like communication breakdowns. It looks like conflict on a team. It looks like silos or subgroups or people not communicating with each other. It all boils back to a misunderstanding of who’s doing what and when. 

Now rest assured on a leadership team, the role of individuals is not to be in the silo and not be the head of their silo, of their department, of their division but to be an equal member under level team with the other leaders. 

So what is the role then, on that team? It’s very different from being ahead of your own department and when you rise up and now you’re a member of the leadership team. It’s really important to have folks have clarity around what the purpose of the team is and what they’re expected to be able to provide and produce on that team. 

Similarly, we’re looking at the cross-functionality of a leadership team. It’s so important that the team members all understand not only the roles of each individual. And it’s amazing to me how many teams haven’t really written that down and had discussions around it. And so people start to make assumptions and based on those assumptions, then we start to believe that people might not be doing what they’re expected to do or what they should be doing. And we get frustrated and that drives our communication. All of this undermines how your team is functioning. Take time to have discussions around whose role is what on the team. Make sure it’s documented and make sure you continually come back to it because most of the conflicts that happen in leadership teams are often process issues or they’re about expectations that one individual might have that the other doesn’t. Unwritten undocumented expectations are the bane of any leadership team’s existence. 

You have to be really clear. Make sure it’s documented. Make sure everybody on the team understands what their role is on the team. That way you can start to have deeper communication and conversation around what the end goal is and everybody’s role in getting to that final destination. So, the thing to do to overcome that role clarity issue that can serve as an obstacle is simply to take time, make sure to pull out the job descriptions. 

Now the job descriptions often fail in comparison to what the actual individual is really doing. So I find sometimes working with teams it’s great. We’ll put a flip chart and write down who’s doing what. You must create a workflow to show who’s responsible for all the areas on the leadership team, who is responsible for what, and to be able to really clearly articulate that. Without those clear expectations again, there’s going to be conflict and it’s going to undermine the success of your leadership team. Write it down, have discussions about it, surface it. Don’t assume that everybody understands because they don’t. I guarantee that. That’s the first area, role clarity. 

The second area that really undermines how leadership teams function is culture bias. Well, culture is kind of a nebulous term. Often people don’t really understand what culture is. Most teams I see are driven by a culture bias and they’re not even aware because they don’t have the structure or the lens to look at and understand how the decisions they’re making are being influenced in a particular way because of the culture of the organization and really the culture of the individuals and the team. 

So first of all, what is culture? In my mind culture is simply what happens when people come together. It’s the way people intentionally or unintentionally decide to behave when they’re in that particular context. So think about this, you behave completely differently when you’re at the game Friday night than you do when you’re at church Sunday morning. There’s a different culture, different norms and expectations. Nobody spells it out. Nobody says you must behave this way but you do. 

Now here’s the thing. When you’re at work, we all have preferences in how we move through the decision-making processes. Some people are big idea figures, they like to reach for the sky and they have their heads in the clouds. Other people want their heads down in the weeds. 

Well depending on the individual personality makeup of the people on your team, there’s gonna be a bias. Winding up with teams of accounts, they behave completely differently than leadership teams in a marketing organization. So in a marketing organization, what I’ll find is those individuals will be latent with ideas and always want to discuss the next thing. When I find accounting organizations, they’ll be down in the weeds and they’ll really be going meticulously through the details. So the point is, your team will have a particular culture. 

The interesting thing is again, I just experienced this two days ago, that one individual had a distinctly different personality profile than the overall makeup of the team. He tended to think differently and that difference was devalued. He was seen as the issue on the team. He didn’t. 

It’s easy to buy into the perspective when the team was making decisions, the decisions the team came up with, he would have a reason why or see things differently, the reason why it might not work. He became the bane of the team’s existence. 

But the interesting thing is when we really started to pull it apart and dissected it, the team realized that he was the one who was really bringing the goal to the team. Because what happens when like-minded people come together? Group thinking starts to happen. People start to think the same. People with similar mindsets will agree with each other and they’ll have a quick problem-solving process. They’ll come to a solution, but there will be holes in their logic that will undermine the solution as they try to drive it forward. So making sure that those people who tend to think differently than the mainstream of your team, those people who sometimes feel on the fringe, or the people who cause frustration because they will seem to have a different perspective than the rest of the team. Those people can be gold. 

I’ve seen those individuals save organizations because of the blindness that happens with groupthink, where people think the same way, and that’s the team culture, and they all buy-in, and they all agree, and there’s one individual saying “Wait a minute. We haven’t looked at it this way.” That one individual steps outside who frustrates the rest of the team, but that individual can be the saving grace.

So when talking about cultural bias, it’s really important to understand, find a tool to be able to understand the culture of the team, and see how individuals fit into it. Again, I’m harkening back. Thinking back to that team two days ago, it was phenomenal. When we use a culture tool to understand the culture of the team, then it’s everything that had preceded started to make more sense to the team. It was funny to see him burst out laughing, like of course now we understand why it is you did this, and you did this, and either this when talking to the executive. And it gave him permission to not take it personally because he looked at things very differently than the rest of the team. 

So paying attention to culture bias, recognizing that there’s going to be a personality for that team that is of a certain way of how the teams are going to operate and there will be individuals on that team who will not fit in as comfortably, who will think differently than the main culture of the team. That is going to create some friction unless you can bring those people on board and validate their perspectives. Let them know they’re heard and recognize that what they’re bringing is gold. You’re going to have some obstacles to your team’s success. Bring him on board. 

That’s #2 culture bias, so we have role clarity number one, making sure you have clarity of what the roles are on the roles and the goals on the team. Number two is culture bias – recognizing that every team has its own thumbprint, its own unique personality. 

The third element that really undermines all of a leadership team’s success is the lack of alignment. Now when I talk about alignment, it’s really about just moving the same direction and there are some things that get in the way – the 3 core areas that really undermine alignment on a business leadership team. 

One is not having a clear team charter or understanding where the team is trying to go – what’s the purpose of the team? The second is not having a dedicated space, a war room. And the third is not having consistent meeting times. 

So let’s break it down. When you think about creating a deeper level of alignment on your business leadership team, creating that team charter is essential, right? It is much the same way the organization will have a really kind of articulated, documented leadership purpose of vision and mission statement. What have you? Your values? It’s really important to do that for the business leadership team as well, otherwise, people will default to reporting out. It’s such a waste of energy and time to get your executive team together for folks to report out. You can read reports online. No, it’s gotta be the time together that must be used to solve the highest level of issues for the organization, to have everybody be there bringing their A-game, and when they’re there to not be acting as a department head, not being their silos,  make sure it’s not a report group, but it’s actually a team where you’re solving problems and working together to move the organization forward. 

So right down the Charter, the purpose of the team. So everybody is really clear about why the team exists and where the team is trying to go. Then as we talked about earlier, making sure you have clarity on what the roles are on that team, it’s really important.

Now, once the team charters are in place, it’s really important to have a common goal. Funny, I just got off the phone with a company leader down in North Carolina and he recognized that one of the things he hadn’t been doing, especially with everything that’s been going on lately, is there wasn’t a clear, common goal that the team could come together around. And decided right the second half of the year, that the business leadership team is going to focus on visual management. And that way, everybody around the business leadership table had a common goal that they’re all working together and nobody’s individual success would come without everybody being successful. That’s when alignment is in place, that’s what we’re talking about getting out of the trap of just measuring departmental goals because then that’s going to breed loyalty of your executives and your leaders to their individual apartments. Having a common goal that everybody around the team can commit to is key. Having that team charter in place and then common goals for the business leadership team.

Then the third thing is consistently meeting, right? So make sure there’s a place where they’re consistently meeting, they have that time and it does not report out. It’s a time where they’re solving problems where they’re moving the organization forward to work on strategic initiatives. So many organizations though, fall back into firefighting and fail to hold that time sacred. Make sure you’re holding that time sacred and your team is coming together to solve those larger strategic issues to move your organization forward and demonstrate that cohesive unity from a singular body that is your leadership team with a common goal, clear alignment and it’s moving all the same direction. Make sure there’s a consistent meeting time and then lastly having a commonplace. A lot of organizations and business leadership teams are creating war rooms. I love helping them do that right, a war room. I’m not sure I love the metaphor, but it’s a dedicated space where the team can go and leave all their data up so when they’re in that space, the mindset is immediate. The goals are listed, the metrics are listed, the key models they used to look at and understand their organization is surrounding them. They’ll have flip charts on the wall with the latest commitments -who’s doing what and when? That way when they reconvene, they reconvene in their war room and it’s impossible to not have accountability because it’s on the wall. Some teams, one team I’m working with, have a lock and key. They locked the door. Nobody is in the room except the executive team. That way they can have sensitive information up on the walls and the executive team walks in and they are immediately surrounded with all of this information and data, all the key metrics, the performance indicators, who’s doing what, and when the accountabilities. Again, there’s no escaping than creating accountability. The beautiful thing is when you dedicate a specific space for your team to meet, and then you begin to populate the walls of that space with the data that’s important and the information and the models that are important to help your team stand track, you meet consistently and you have clarity of purpose and specific goals, you’re going to set your team up for the highest level of success absolutely possible. It’s truly a setup to create a leadership team that will drive your organization into the future.