View From Above
We’ve been doing some interesting product co-creation with a couple of clients lately. They wanted to do some work on their dynamics as a leadership team as they had both undergone changes recently and they wanted a reset.
We’ve adapted Patrick Lencioni’s 5 Dysfunctions of Teams to create a workshop on how to increase functionality rather than just avoid dysfunctionality. When we were a workshop and advisory company, we would run these sessions in our public programme and occasionally as a consulting gig. Now that we’re a leadership development training company, we don’t do workshops or promote our consulting service anymore, but from time to time we’ll do it for ‘friends of the firm’.
In fact, while I have moved away from delivering workshops, speeches and facilitation sessions, I still have a couple of regular co-labs so that I can stay in touch with our clients but also because they always generate some insight for me.
We were talking about accountability for results, and I asked them “What is the single most important priority for the company?”. Typically enough there were more answers than people, but we got there in the end. Then I asked how we share accountability for that result. Each department’s performance comes under scrutiny and one of the GMs talked honestly and openly about how he gets defensive, but he can’t help himself – he knows his stuff better than the others at the table, he’s loyal to his team and besides what about their etc etc.
His eureka moment came when I said that when they came into the room, they had to leave their department behind and take on the perspective of someone at the leadership table. He had to take his operations hat off and put his whole of business hat on, then look back to each department from the perspective of the single most important priority. And in a moment his world had changed.
We elect MPs from electorates and they have several representation jobs, most of which I’m going to skip over (ask me about Burkean theories of representation if you have a spare hour). At a primary level they represent the interests of their constituents to government – people trying to deal with bureaucracy and red tape, especially immigration. But at the other end of the spectrum, when they’re in Cabinet they do not represent any constituency or interest group (in theory). Their one mandate is to make policy in their interpretation of the best interests of the country as whole.
That’s what a true leadership team does. If you want a marine analogy, their day job is mid-ships, organising the people who organise the people who keep the ship headed in the right direction and the passengers well-cared for. But their leadership role is on the bridge, looking out.
What you see depends on where you stand.