Building a Leadership Team - Part I

Talent is necessary for building a winning leadership team, but talent is not sufficient. You can recruit the very best in every functional area of responsibility in your organization, but unless they work well together, you will fail to create sustainable value. And in a competitive environment, you will lose to teams with far less talent if they work well together but you don’t. There is a tongue in cheek axiom that comes as a corollary to this – “I’d rather be lucky than good.” If you believe in blind luck, go with God and stop reading. If you believe we make our own luck, I’d like to share three principles for creating a great leadership team and some practical insights into each: agreement on the mission, clear communication, and balance.

Part I: Agreement on the mission
I have seen many leaders use the Moses Model to building a mission statement. They go off on a retreat or vacation or a hot shower, have an inspired moment there, and then come back to their teams proclaiming the answer. They proceed to sell that mission to their teams – and since they are the boss, declaring their answer with passion and personal force, constructive debate vanishes. This approach is useful for entrepreneurs forming a raw start-up, but once a team is in place to grow an organization, this model fails. Agreement on the mission sold by our would-be Moses usually only lasts until the first rough spot on the way. At the first substantive challenge, doubt overwhelms action and debate about direction overwhelms collaboration among the leadership team – usually as mumblings without the leader present.

There are leaders who declare themselves knowledgeable and self-aware (which is always a tip-off to the wise) who conduct an offsite to create their strategy, mission statement, vision statement, product roadmap – it comes in many flavors! This process ends in the same failure case as the Moses Model because of the Trump Effect. When Mr. Trump speaks, his lieutenants adjust their world view (intentionally or subconsciously) to more closely align with his. Sometimes the Trump Effect is blunt. I’ve seen a well-known CEO publically impugn the intellect and character of an exec who had the audacity to present an idea not in alignment with his own view. But even if the leader is benign and merely declares a firm belief, they suck the creativity right out of the room just by speaking. Inevitably these well meant offsite exercises result in missions accepted by the leadership team rather than embraced by them. And again, at the first sign of trouble, doubt overwhelms action.

Getting a group of human beings with diverse personal and professional needs and wants to agree on a mission is not easy. It requires a Socrates Model: a leader must ask questions, not just in an offsite, but as a course of daily practice with the leadership team. It means listening without debating. In group settings, it means calling directly on those who are silent to express their view. It requires a leader to offer assertions as a foil for debate; to foster a respectful and rational discussion to challenge those assertions. The leader’s role is to seed the discussion, provoke the team to aspire to something more challenging than they would otherwise do on their own, and push the team in to making a conscious choice. And all the while, listening carefully for tone, for ideas, for fears, and assumptions.

A team sometimes needs the leader to decide direction – especially if an ambivalent set of choices are reached. Using a Socrates Model, the leader suspends judgment until the last reasonable moment. After dissenters and creative thinkers have voiced their ideas and heard those of others, if the discussion doesn’t naturally resolve to an agreed upon mission, the team will usually call on the leader to choose. At that point, a leader can impose will and do so effectively. In a Socrates Model, the team is pulling the leader into a choice they can embrace, whereas in a Moses Model or Trump Effect, the leader is pushing his choice upon the team.

It is important to note, that even if everyone says “We are agreed!” there will always be one straggler in the group. They might not voice it, but you can be certain they are still quite unsure of the merit of the mission. Your job as the leader is to flush them out. It’s alright if they voice doubts in a leadership team setting. It is not acceptable if they voice those doubts outside the team.

Andy Grove made popular a process of cutting through this issue: Agree and commit or disagree and commit, but commit you will. I have also used this methodology and watched it used, but you have to be very careful. Some human beings are good at declaring “all for one and one for all” in a group setting, while still harboring what they believe to be a better idea and then complaining about it among those not on the leadership team. Inevitably this behavior will surface and when it does, you need to challenge that person privately about their ability to commit fully to the mission. Assuming they do re-commit, it can only be on the condition that the next time they subvert privately, they forfeit their role on the team.

Regardless of what process you use to come to agreement on a mission, the most important point is forming enough conviction. Your team will need that conviction to face with courage the seemingly insurmountable challenges that are always encountered along the way to achieving any mission worthy of pursuit.

© 2008 BlueSeven Partners LLC