Key to Helping a Leadership Team Function As a True Team

Despite all the obstacles, perhaps the leader of your company still wants the leadership team to operate as a true team. Who can help such an auspicious group? Perhaps the highest-ranking member of the group can spearhead the effort. Lower members of the team could try if they have the nerve and the support of the top leader. Maybe the head of the human resources function or the coordinator of the team concept efforts could serve as the change agent. More commonly, an external consultant is used due to the political ramifications associated with attempting to unite powerful people as a collective team. If you volunteer or are asked to serve as consultant, how can you help them help themselves ? The answer should not be a surprise to you at this point. If the group of individual leaders truly wants to produce effective team performance, it must develop the seven key components of team excellence required of any group that wishes to function as a team: clear goals and sense of direction, identification of talent, clear roles and responsibilities, agreed-upon procedures, constructive interpersonal relations, active reinforcement of team-oriented behaviors, and diplomatic external ties.

Above all, underlying the leadership team's performance goals must be a meaningful purpose. Why should this group be declared a team? What work is it expected to produce? The development of a team charter is again a great place to start. The group of leaders may be empowered to create its own charter. If the group reports to a board of directors or to other corporate entities, you should at least suggest that you be involved in the charter's development. Exercise 13 (see p. 91) can still serve you well as you attempt to help this leadership team. However, when you get to the point of the team attempting to identify its "SMART" goals, make sure that the goals of the team are not merely a restatement of the goals of the facility. Yes, the leadership team has overall responsibility to help the plant achieve productivity and profitability goals, but so does everyone else in the company. Push the group to identify what it specifically will produce by when. If the goal is to produce a strategic plan to achieve productivity targets, when should the plan be ready for presentation? If the goal is to change the operating system of the facility from its current method to one that embraces the principles of lean manufacturing, what will the leadership team produce and share with its stakeholders? If this group of individual leaders wants to truly work as a team, the goals of its collective efforts must be clear and will likely change as each plan and rollout is produced.

To operate as a leadership team, the right people need to be on the bus. There is no substitute for managerial competencebelief and confidence in the organization are based on it. The talent has to be there and it has to be put to use. If the egos of leadership team members get in the way of utilizing the knowledge and skills of these key people, the whole organization suffers. Who should be actual members of the leadership team, and who should serve as resource people brought in occasionally to provide assistance on specific elements of its work? The talent required depends on the product the team is expected to produce. If the product is a strategic plan to set direction for the whole organization, then the team needs to include members with the subject matter expertise of the functional areas involved. But if the team is too large, it will be difficult to demonstrate the discipline needed to function as a team. Events may be staged to get input from many constituencies, and membership of the leadership team making the final decisions may be limited to a core group of leaders.

Members need to understand their individual role on the leadership team. Individual responsibilities must be clearly defined in addition to any set of collective responsibilities. What task- related role is person X to deliver in order for the team to produce? What is expected of that person for the team to work together? What dysfunctional roles should be modified or eliminated for the group to actually function as a team? Who should be involved in the negotiation of these roles to provide leadership to this team? Typically the highest-ranking member has this responsibility, but others must step up as well.

Leadership teams that model how to run meetings, make decisions, solve problems, and produce plans can set the tone for teams throughout an organization. They need to follow a disciplined approach to these procedures to show others that this is the key to excellence. Constructive interpersonal relations must also be modeled . Leadership teams that don't have conflict and quickly agree on most issues are likely to be seen as a bunch of yes-men. Conflict and debate must take place, but they must not be conducted as personal attacks. People must see that the passion of conflicting points of view produces improved organizational strategies and plans.

Rarely do leadership teams receive collective bonuses for their collective success. Each member has a set of objectives that drives whether he or she receives a bonus. If those objectives motivate members to compete with each other rather than collaborate, the likelihood of working as a true leadership teams is low. Recognition for team-oriented behaviors can provide the reinforcement needed. Leadership team members must not personally or publicly criticize their colleagues. In fact they should be boosters, bragging about their teammates' wealth of knowledge and skills. No one can know everything needed to run a great company today. When employees see the pride and admiration leadership team members express to one another, these behaviors can be contagious.

Leadership team members cannot isolate themselves. They cannot be perceived as some secret committee that makes key decisions that greatly affect the work lives of all organization members. Members of true leadership teams understand that they are servant leaders, in a position to help several constituencies: employees, customers, shareholders, and the community at large. Leadership team members need to be credible individual leaders and responsible team players. No wonder it can be such a challenge to help leadership team members help themselves. Let me share with you another example.

A Leadership Team Story

I was working with the leadership team of a large manufacturing plant in the West that would be launching a whole new production system over a one-year period. They needed to designate sessions to work together as a team to establish a vision of the new way of doing business and design an implementation plan to move to the new system. This rollout required a team at the top. However, most of their time still needed to be dedicated to keeping the plant running. They worked as a group of individuals to keep their colleagues informed and sometimes sought input regarding current operational problems. They were the subject matter experts of their functions and areas. They united to transform the overall organization and keep their specialties successful yet aligned. Most members had dual reporting relationships. Each reported to the plant manager, but most also reported to a corporate vice president dedicated to their functional area. This need to please two bosses led to some tension. The plant manager tended to use a laissez-faire leadership style, and this produced a power vacuum on the team and competition between team members for more influence. As their shared sense of direction for the plant's new production system grew, cohesion of the leadership team members also grew some what. However, this lack of unity of purposeand of styleproved to be the team's Achilles' heel from time to time.

About half the members of the team are New Englanders recently transferred to the plant by the corporation. Team members need to constantly fight the temptation to isolate themselves and work out the change plans on their own. They are learning the importance of gaining input from the long- term employees rather than trying to sell a plan to the workforce. They have come to be seen as very bright men and women. They come up with great ideas but sometimes lose credibility by failing to follow through on those ideas. They are now working on better ways to collaborate with the workforce to ensure that the elements of the new culture come from within rather than be seen as something imposed by the corporate heads back east.