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Our Top 10 Insights – Teams and Executions

Our Top 10 Insights – Teams and Executions

Happy New Year!

I hope you had an enjoyable and restful break. I have had a good break with lots of rest, recreation and reflection!
One of my reflections was that I have now been working with leaders and teams for two decades now. And in that time, I have worked with literally 100s of teams across different industries and contexts.

And I have learnt a lot…

And with this breadth and depth of experience, I have noticed similar patterns, trends and challenges – independent of the type of organisation or industry.

So I wanted to kick off 2015 by sharing some of these insights with you.

So here are my ‘Top 10 Insights’ about teams, team leadership and getting results.

Top 10 Insights….

1. Team Leadership is Challenging – despite teams being found in all organisations and at all levels, stand-out management and leadership of teams is, unfortunately, the exception rather than the rule (something I call the ‘leadership gap’). This doesn’t, by-the-way, mean that leaders of these teams are poor leaders, it just means that it entails a specific approach and skillset that can be difficult to master.

2. Active Management is Required – teams require active management. A ‘set and forget’ approach rarely, if ever, works. You need to treat a team like any relationship – they don’t run on autopilot for very long.

3. Performance and Health – a focus on performance alone is not enough. Performance is often seen as the panacea to the exclusion of everything else. A team (or organisation) that isn’t ‘healthy’ (e.g. dynamics, culture, climate) will eventually fragment and become dysfunctional, thereby ultimately compromising performance anyway.

4. ‘Senior’ Doesn’t Equal ‘Better’ – there is no correlation between the seniority of team members and being a more effective, high performing team. Boards are just as functional/dysfunctional as junior teams (sometimes more problematic because they can be set in their ways!).

5. Different Skills – being an awesome manager, leader or technician of your craftdoesn’t guarantee that you’ll be able to lead a team well. Great team leadership requires similar but different skills and approach.

6. It’s All About Results – a team that fails to execute the plan and implement effectively is really just a group of people who hang out together and waste of lot of valuable time and energy. There are many groups of people who call themselves a team but fail to harness the benefits of being a true team.

7. It’s Not Personal – people in teams usually use narrow and limited ‘lenses’ to understand how the team works and their place in it. This leads to a strong bias towards seeing everything as ‘personal’ rather than as actors in an ever-changing system.

8. Successful Teams Build Support Mechanisms – the most successful teams methodically build support mechanisms within and outside of the team. These can be as simple as structuring team meetings so they serve the purpose they were set up for through to actively creating a network of support in the business.

9. The Vision Thing – despite protestations from many leaders, I usually find that the vision, strategy and tactical roadmap aren’t as clear as they could be – leading to confusion and conflict. Accountability and results usually suffer as as a result.

10. It’s All About the Soft Stuff to Get the Hard Stuff Done – yes, sorry folks, theengine room of effective teams are the things that many managers struggle with – having courageous conversations; building (real) trust; attending to relationships; being skilled at managing group dialogue, providing feedback, managing conflict and stretching/developing people everyday.

I hope you found these useful and help you with your own reflections. Whether you lead a team, or are responsible for helping develop teams in your organisation, some (or all) of the insights may ring true for you.

We know that teams can benefit from an approach that addresses the discussion points above because we have enjoyed a lot of success in helping teams address them.

So much so, that we have constructed a program with all of the best elements built in to the program.

The program is called the Distinctive Execution Program and leverages our own knowledge and experience (and the best from around the world) about what helps teams plan and execute to an exemplary standard.

It is an exciting program that has produced excellent results in surprisingly short time frames.

You can watch a three minute video here to find out more, go to our website to read more or download the brochure.

Feel free to email me at phillipr@theleadershipsphere.com.au or call our national number on 1300 100 857 if you think your team or the teams in your organisation could benefit.

Wishing you and your team(s) all the very best for the year.

Sincerely,

Phillip Ralph
The Leadership Sphere

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