The Leadership Story

It had been almost three weeks since their last one-on-one, but having returned from India and with Angela's sudden departure, Steve was anxious to get the process started again. He reflected on how easy it was for pressing matters to get in the way of focusing on important things like coaching his people.

Ben was rushed and a bit frustrated that he had to attend this one on one. Especially today, it seemed there were so many deadlines waiting on his attention.

In  my last blog post, I talked about a client I worked with in Fort Collins, Colorado and how important it is to have clarity about your senior leadership team's purpose.

But let me take a step back.

"Leading from good to great does not mean coming up with the answers and then motivating everyone to follow your messianic vision. It means having the humility to grasp the fact that you do not yet understand enough to have the answers and then to ask the questions that will lead to the best possible insights."

- Jim Collins, Good to Great

I was recently facilitating a strategic team building offsite for a senior leadership team in Colorado, and at the break one of the leaders approached me to talk about one of his team members. This particular team member was having a negative impact on the overall team, but the leader was having a difficult time putting his finger on what the team member was doing that was creating such a ripple effect.

In the first two parts of this article, I discussed the impact that senior leadership teams have on their organization. The behaviors that begin at the senior leadership team level ripple through an organization, and just like a wave that grows as it nears its shore, those behaviors also grow and get repeated - regardless of whether they have a positive or negative impact on the organization.

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There is one thing that is common to every individual, relationship, team, family, organization, nation, economy, and civilization throughout the world - one thing which, if removed, will destroy the most powerful government, the most successful business, the most thriving economy, the most influential leadership, the greatest friendship, the strongest character, the deepest love.

In Part 1 of this article, I discussed the impact that senior leadership teams have on employee engagement, productivity, and retention. And, I made it very clear that the behaviors that originate at the executive team level ripple through the organization. Just like a wave that gets larger as it nears the shore, those behaviors get magnified and repeated - regardless of whether they have a positive or negative impact.

"The conduct of a company's leadership team is directly correlated with the organization's long-term performance."

In her article Lessons from Team Fumbles, Susan Lucia Annunzio goes on to say "Once-venerable institutions such as Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and Royal Bank of Scotland paid the ultimate price for the behaviors of their leadership teams."

Some of the behaviors Annunzio is referring to includes:

Have you ever watched a 400-meter relay team work?
On a good team, their hand-offs are impeccable.

In fact, given two teams of equal quality runners, the team with the more efficient
hand-offs always wins. The same holds true in the work place.