4 Insights for Building a Great Leadership Team in 2020
First of all, Happy New Year!! We hope you all had a great holiday season and that 2020 is prosperous, healthy and fun.
Over the holidays I had some time to reflect on our 10-year journey at Relationship Impact and today I want to share a few insights to consider for 2020 and beyond. While not necessarily easy to execute, we are confident that if taken seriously these 4 practical insights will help you build a truly great leadership team.
1. Don’t emulate our political parties! – Every day in the newspapers, online media and television news we see our political parties at each other’s throats. The love of country and compromise illustrated in Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan’s relationship seems to be a thing of the past. And, this lack of compromise and vitriol has crept into our relationships with family and friends and at work. To be effective leadership teams simply have to shed the zero-sum game mentality and get good at disagreeing.
2. Be the change! – When working to strengthen a leadership team our advice is to embrace the following mantra – “It’s about me, not everyone else.” At least this is a good place to start. Of course, as the saying goes ‘it takes two to tango’ and if there are challenges on a leadership team each member should examine their contributions. A cascading effect often happens when individuals get vulnerable, share their insights and take responsibility.
3. Embrace the grey areas! – The devil is in the detail or in the case of leadership teams the devil is in the grey areas between team member roles. The days of her department does this and his department does that are long gone. Sure, there are core roles that leaders and their departments play but leadership teams are simply fooling themselves if they don’t address the ambiguities between roles and anticipate the related unintended consequences.
4. Define some simple rules of the game! – Most leadership teams are acutely aware of many of the collective and individual challenges that are getting in their way. The bad news is that many teams continue to beat their heads against the wall and either ignore the challenges or create cumbersome workarounds. The good news is that something can be done, and the time is now to do it! Step back, listen to each other about what’s not working, and commit to doing something about it. And we aren’t talking about a set of ground rules or norms that are typed up and put on a poster. We are talking about real commitments that each team member agrees to operate by and to accept feedback when they don’t.