Building a Cohesive Leadership Team
“Great teams do not hold back with one another. They are unafraid to air their dirty laundry. They admit their mistakes, their weaknesses, and their concerns without fear of reprisal.” - Patrick Lencioni
If you’ve engaged with us before today, you're familiar with one of our favorite soapboxes: Organizations can only be as healthy as their leadership team is healthy.
And a healthy leadership team is, in part, one in which all leaders, from supervisors to executives, are singing off the same sheet of music with best-practice leadership and management behaviors. Naturally, every leader will use their unique style – and they should! - but the fundamental philosophy and skills with which they manage people need to be aligned. We’ve seen many organizations in which leaders all go off in different directions and read different management books and attend different leadership conferences, and although these individual leaders often bring back great skills, they are not bringing back the same skills to the organization. This leads to a goulash of misaligned management philosophies and behaviors. When this happens, it leads to a lack of accountability, confusion, and no clear way to evaluate if leaders are behaving in a way that supports and promotes the desired leadership culture.
When all leaders are marching in the same direction with best-practice management skills, that’s where the magic happens. And when all leaders are marching in the same direction by practicing effective and healthy skills and behaviors characterized by humanism, psychological safety, clear and consistent communication, accountability, and involvement, amazing achievements are possible. We’ve seen it happen many times over.
[Check out our Managing with Mind & Heart leadership development program.]
The point here, again, is that all leaders need to be aligned. Yet far too often, this effort comes up short because the upper leadership team doesn’t grasp the vitality of them being aligned and cohesive as well. It’s not uncommon for us to have a meeting with a senior leader that goes something like this:
CEO: We need to get our managers and supervisors aligned. We need to establish a clear and consistent leadership culture.
Nash Consulting: Well, I’m glad you called us. I think we can help with that. Before we discuss your broader leadership team of managers and supervisors, I want to understand more about your senior leadership team. Do you feel this group has a high level of trust and is committed to the top priorities of the organization?
CEO: I’m not here to talk about the senior leadership team. It’s the managers and supervisors who can’t seem to get their act together. We need to get them on the same page and set expectations on how to manage.
Nash Consulting: I agree – that is important. And before we get there, I’d like to know about the health of your senior leadership team and understand how cohesive you all are. We’ve found that it’s difficult to create clear expectations with managers and supervisors if the senior leadership team is not fully aligned. The health of an organization starts with the health of the upper leadership team since they are the ones who set the direction and steer the culture of the organization. It’s critical that there is no daylight between these leaders in terms of commitments and top priorities. And it’s difficult to achieve this type of clarity if this team isn’t healthy. A healthy leadership team is one in which they trust each other, can openly express disagreements and debate them, reach clear decisions, get total commitment on those decisions, and hold each other accountable for them.
CEO: Everyone knows our top priorities. And this senior leadership team is far too busy for “team-building.” We need to focus on running this organization. I want you to work with the managers and supervisors.
This CEO, of course, is missing this key principle: A healthy organization is one in which all the pieces (including the behaviors and skills) are aligned, whole, and make sense, and everyone is totally clear on the top priorities and direction. This can’t happen if the executive team doesn’t trust one another enough to have healthy debate about ideas. And when they can’t openly disagree with each other, it’s unlikely that they’ll fully commit to decisions (or even make good decisions), leading to a lack of accountability (after all, they never fully committed anyways), which leads to a lack of results. It can be an unattractive and demoralizing situation, but fortunately, an avoidable one.
A Healthy and Cohesive Leadership Team
If a group of people makes key organizational or departmental decisions together, that group of people needs to be healthy before they can expect the rest of the department or organization to be healthy and achieve sustained positive results. In family counseling, the counselor doesn’t start by working with the kids; they start by working with the parents in building skills and creating true clarity. The same systems-view perspective applies to organizations: you create a healthy organization by working specifically with the leadership team that is tasked with setting the direction and making key decisions. And that leadership team needs to build a high level of trust with each other, master conflict, get total buy-in on commitments (even when people disagree), and hold each other accountable for those commitments.
We are not reinventing the wheel here. Patrick Lencioni outlined this process for building a cohesive leadership team in his books The Advantage and The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team. And it works really well. (Learn more about his company The Table Group here.) We adapted his model, added a whole ton of specific skills, and rolled it into our broader leadership development strategy for building healthy organizations. Here is how the concepts work:
Build Trust
Without the ability to show up with one another authentically, it’s impossible to move up into the other four levels: team members won’t honestly disagree about ideas (conflict), making it impossible to sincerely commit, which by extension makes peer accountability unlikely, leading to poor or nonexistent results.
The key principle: Psychological safety, by which each group member feels safe enough to speak freely and fearlessly because they trust the others to accept them in all their humanness, weaknesses, and all. This is a prerequisite for achieving positive results.
[See our blog post on creating psychological safety with your team.]
Master Conflict
When teams can engage in honest, authentic, ideological debate and discussions around ideas and issues (conflict), people are much more likely to truly commit to decisions, which makes holding one another accountable for missed commitments possible, leading to better results.
The key principle: Meetings in which team members withhold their true opinions, stay quiet when they disagree, and engage in artificial harmony are not only boring but also lead to ineffective and/or counterproductive outcomes.
[See our podcast Episode #21 on running effective and enjoyable meetings.]
Embrace Commitment
When team members sincerely, fully, and explicitly commit to a decision together, it becomes so much more likely that they will hold one another accountable for supporting that decision, which greatly increases the odds of successful results.
The key principle: The most effective teams, after honest discussion and debate, are able to make a decision and then, even when the group doesn’t achieve consensus, leave the room unambiguously committed to a common course of action.
[See our podcast Episode #35 on how to do consensus decision-making.]
Practice Accountability
When the leader and (maybe more importantly) peers are willing to hold each other accountable for behaviors that pertain to the team’s decisions, goals, and overall success, it becomes far more likely that deadlines will be met, action items accomplished, and unhelpful behaviors effectively addressed, leading to more positive results.
The key principle: After commitment is established, team members must be willing to hold one another accountable for those commitments and respectfully but clearly remind one another when actions are counterproductive to the team’s success.
[See our podcast Episode #7 on giving effective feedback.]
Prioritize Results
When team members focus solely on the results of their individual departments or their own career development, status, or egos, as opposed to focusing on the success of their “first team” (and by extension the success of the overall organization), results are limited by internal politics, win/lose thinking, and a lack of synergy.
The key principle: In the most effective teams, each team member considers that leadership group to be their “first team,” and they think and behave in ways that demonstrate a true commitment to the mutually agreed-upon goals, objectives, and actions of that team, even above the short-term success of their own individual departments or careers.
Where to Start
A great place to start, as you might have guessed, is by building trust, which is mostly about creating psychological safety. This is one of the foundations for achieving the positive results every organization and team desires. It may sound touchy-feely, but it’s not – it’s absolutely necessary for a high-functioning team. And the good news is that building trust doesn’t require trust falls or human pyramids (although have at it if you so desire). Here are a few basic actions your leadership team can do for building trust:
Behavior styles profiles. We believe that trust starts with understanding why people show up the way they do. It’s too easy to attribute someone’s behaviors to incompetence, disrespect, laziness, and so forth. But the reality is, people see and behave in the world differently based on their own behavior style. When we can see why someone shows up the way they do, even if it’s different than the way we show up, we can better understand their intentions, sticking points, attributes, and more. This allows us to more freely extend understanding and grace, which creates an environment where peoples’ strengths can be maximized. Understanding the different behavior profiles on your team is a great foundation for building trust. If you’re interested in our behavior styles workshop, check it out here.
[See our six-part podcast series Episodes #15-20 on behavior styles in the workplace.]
Discuss each other’s unique life challenges. When we can see the humanism in each of us, we can better extend empathy, which leads to trust. Consider asking your team to share one big challenge they’ve faced in life, either that they feel they’ve successfully overcome or are still working on overcoming. The leader of the group will set the tone – they should go first, and if they are willing to be vulnerable and honest, others likely will too. We find that most teams are surprised by what they learn from their colleagues, and this exercise usually helps them better understand each other at a deeper level.
Brainstorm on the behaviors of psychological safety. Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson defines psychological safety as the belief that, while in a particular group of people, you have the freedom to speak out, make mistakes, disagree, and be authentic without fear that team members will embarrass, reject, or “punish” you. Lencioni uses the term “vulnerability-based trust,” and describes it as what happens when team members are comfortable being transparent and honest with one another, where they can say things like, “I screwed up,” “I need help,” “your idea is better than mine,” “I disagree with you,” and “I’m sorry.” When team members know that no one is going to hide their weaknesses and mistakes, they develop a deep and uncommon sense of trust. Here are a couple suggested activities:
1. Ask your team to brainstorm on all the behaviors that they can think of that would cause others to develop a sense of psychological safety with them. Be sure to look for “don’ts” (don’t interrupt) and “do’s” (do apologize for mistakes).
A hint: Ask them to think about someone they feel “safe” with; what has that person done (or not done) that has contributed to that feeling?
2. Ask the group to discuss the level of psychological safety that exists on the team. What signs do people notice that indicate a high level? What signs do they notice that may indicate a need for improvement?
Let these discussions guide the creation of common behavioral commitments that the team will agree to practice with the goal of building a culture of psychological safety.
This is a great place to start for achieving the healthy leadership team we all want. We fully recognize that these can be pretty complex conversations, especially if creating a cohesive team has not been a priority. It can be useful to bring in a third party who is skilled in facilitating discussions and learning around trust, conflict, commitment, accountability, and results. Luckily, we know a company that can help with that. contact@nashconsulting.com
[For more on this topic, see our podcast episode # 54 on building a cohesive leadership team]