CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

STRENGTH IN NUMBERS

The Advantage of Being a Top Team

By Lawrence S. Levin

For the past twenty years, we at the Levin Group have worked closely with executive teams within global Fortune 1000 and midcap companies across the span of health care, financial services, manufacturing, life sciences, and technology.

We’ve helped senior teams learn to navigate growth, manage significant and complex change, and address the new and ever-changing global marketplace and economies. These experienced teams have had to react to sudden shifts in political and economic conditions and commodity prices, as well as to global mergers and rapid, unexpected market changes. They have had to think simultaneously of how to grow a business courageously while “bottom-proofing” it against a downturn. These are smart people doing what is “business as usual” for a Top Team—or at least should be. And these teams are both committed and ultimately responsible for setting and executing strategy, for ensuring financial results, and for securing a future for their employees.

As the speed of change continues to accelerate, and as volatility, complexity, and ambiguity increase, the interconnectedness of the global marketplace becomes even more apparent. These are tough times for top executive teams, who are faced with a new series of challenges and paradoxes that require new mindsets and thinking about driving success. The questions they must ask themselves are many and difficult. For instance:

Top Teams Versus High Performance Teams

It is no exaggeration to say that leadership, more than ever, is a team sport. As high-potentials develop, an essential area of their expertise must be in building and developing the quality of the teams on which they serve and those teams that report to them. For many years, the gold standard of teams was the “High Performing Team.” But in today’s environment, the elements found in a good High Performing Team are now the ticket of admission to being a Top Team—an exceptional, high-caliber, super-performing team that can drive growth in a world of increased volatility, complexity, ambiguity, and speed of change. This is about how good teams get even better to become great teams in a more complex world.

Developing the High-Potential Leader

Evolving and high-potential leaders today require a different skill set than leaders of the past. They are asked to do more, handle more complexity, and deal with more paradox than leaders who preceded them.

Leading in the Now and the New

Irial Finan, head of Coca-Cola’s Bottling Investment Group, tells his emerging leaders that they have to be able to manage multiple and seemingly conflicting demands simultaneously. They have to be strong general managers who know the details, issues, operational and performance metrics of their business, and drive “the fierce urgency of execution.” And they have to know how the business makes money.

Yet at the same time, they have to have the strong strategic competencies that allow them to understand evolving social, geopolitical, and economic issues, and broadly think “over the horizon” about competitive differentiation. As one of our pharmaceutical clients said, “In the fierce urgency of the now, you earn the right to implement tomorrow’s future by executing today.”

We call this leading in the “Now and the New.” A paradox to be sure, but one essential to navigate. Leaders must have the ability to zoom into the details and zoom out to the bigger context in which they play.

Being Truly for Something: The Power of a Collective Future

What represents the first critical waypoint in a Top Team’s journey, is the articulation of a uniting common purpose and a clear and agreed vision of a desired future—in other words, what the team is truly for. This is the key aligning principle of a Top Team and the start of its journey as it begins to define the intersection of leadership direction, organizational concern, and current reality. To be sure, this is a very different process from writing a typical vision or mission statement, which often becomes more of a slogan than a deep source of gravity, focus, and commitment. To go through a process of defining what a Top Team is for requires honest, deep, and ongoing dialogue among the members of a senior team and throughout the organization about current realities, real possibilities, and what must and must not change in order to secure the future of the organization.

As Mickey Connolly writes, “The source of teamwork is a common future.”1 Everything must be on the table as teams redefine success and survival. As a senior leader in a large pharmaceutical company told us, “We have to get past how we have historically looked at things; overcome our classic objections, such as, ‘We’ve never done it that way’ or ‘That won’t work here’; and move the conversation forward.” This sounds easier than it is. In debriefing our Top Teaming Assessment with senior leadership teams, the first question “We clearly understand our senior purpose—what we are for as a team” has often been the driver of several hours of intensive dialogue. Because the corporate environment today is not business as usual, Top Teams must continually reexamine how they work together in the service of the mission. In other words, they must constantly redefine themselves as a team.

One Size Does Not Fit All

Once a team has begun the process of articulating its senior purpose, it needs to define what kind of team it must be to accomplish it. There is no textbook answer. Simply put, the type of team that is needed and how members must operate together depends completely on what this team needs to do in the service of the organization’s strategic and critical priorities. Teams that are tasked with growth are different from teams that are tasked with maintaining stability. A team that requires high interdependence on one another is different from a team that represents a portfolio of businesses (a “bowling team”). Though there is no one right way to design a team, most intact teams express a clear need for higher interdependency as they set and begin to move toward more ambitious and higher-level goals. They know, as Marshall Goldsmith (2007) would say, “what got them here won’t get them there.”2 And there are organizations that are specific about exactly where they must be more collaborative as a team and where they can continue to operate as they are. Simply put, there is no one “right” type of team or structure. It completely depends on what a team is tasked to do—again, what it is for.

Once a team has defined how it needs to be structured in order to accomplish the senior purpose, there are some difficult conversations that must occur. Often these take place between the leader and his or her trusted advisors, and sometimes they occur in the room within the team. The question of whether the team has the “right people on the bus,” as Jim Collins states in Good to Great,3 is a difficult yet essential question. In our work as executive coaches, we are often called upon to help assess and develop executives who have to grow in their roles and capabilities to contribute to a Top Team. It is a demand and a stretch to play at this level. And it must be a conscious process for those evolving leaders who have been asked to operate in a new and critical role.

One of the common observations we hear from senior leaders about teams that are described as exceptional is that the individual intelligence and experience of the team members is a given. What is different is how people “show up” with one another to utilize their experience and intelligence. Top Teams bring tremendous expertise, experience, and collective intelligence to address the most complex issues. Simply put, if they didn’t have this capability, they wouldn’t be considered a Top Team for long. Yet it is in harnessing the dialogue and intellectual rigor needed to balance the complex paradoxes that they face on a regular basis where Top Teams shine. We have a bias for dialogue within Top Teams about the most essential and difficult issues. We absolutely believe that Top Teams must be able to put the most complex issues they face on the table and talk about them.

Trust over Peace: Addressing and Resolving the Issues That Matter

One of the most essential yet difficult variables that distinguishes Top Teams from most other executive teams is their ability to engage in this honest, candid, and authentic dialogue. Dialogue (from the Greek dia-logos) literally means an exchange of ideas. In our work with teams, and in our observation of Top Teams, there is a high premium put on addressing the most important and often the most difficult issues within the team setting, with an eye toward resolving them. Jake Jackson, retired executive of a large financial institution, talks about how teams can choose to prioritize peace over trust or vice versa. Most of us have experienced this when we have participated in polite, careful, and indirect teams. In this dynamic, issues may be noted, but they are not explored in depth. At worst, civility in public gives rise to passive-aggressive or indirect behavior in private as members of teams talk over the watercooler or an adult beverage about those very issues that should be on the table.

In Top Teams, the opposite must occur—trust must be even more important than keeping the peace. This requires leaders to encourage, demand, and ensure that it is safe to talk openly about anything. As Sidney Taurel of Eli Lilly was widely attributed as saying when opening the dialogue up for honest interactions, “Put the moose on the table.” This is far easier said than done, as the culture of many firms is deeply “nice,” yet indirect. Periodically, we hear the horror story of the executive who was shunned, banned, or fired for being too honest. In truth, this is rare. For many new team members, however, political correctness, carefulness, and less-than-direct conversations often occur as they become familiar with the culture and earn their stripes. Yet one of the greatest differentiators between adequate teams and Top Teams is in the harnessing and integrating of their members’ experience and wisdom accomplished by deliberate and focused dialogue. Another way of stating this is if people didn’t want to hear what you had to say, you wouldn’t be sitting in the chair.

Defining and Managing the Critical Intersections

As teams come together and begin to have the forward-thinking dialogue about how they need to operate, several critical conversations begin to occur. The first is deciding how best to structure given the expressed level of interdependency. Matrix organizations are designed to maximize flow of products or services by minimizing the numbers of redundant functions within each division or unit and by increasing collaboration between operational and functional areas. Yet matrix organizations are often seen as unwieldy and hard to navigate. This is where the process of identifying and managing critical intersections occurs.

Simply put, the easiest and most elegant way to navigate a matrix is to map the organization, identify those people with whom you have to have successful outcomes, then go out and, as one of our favorite leaders says, “Make and cut your deals.” What he means is that people who are involved in any critical intersection—whether it involves working across a matrix, in an intersection between a functional and an operational area, or who operate as teams of people that pursue similar customers—must connect with one another, define what is important to them, listen for what is important to others, affirm what is important to the organization, and then make (and keep) agreements. This is relational intelligence (RI) at its finest, which accomplishes several things concurrently: it builds those critical relationships within the informal organization; it accelerates decision making and accountability as the right people are talking directly to one another about what matters; and it makes a complex structure significantly easier to navigate in the service of the customer. It also serves to free up senior leaders, who are not asked nearly as often to make day-to-day decisions and can thus spend more time on the larger issues critical for the senior team.

A CFO of a major financial institution commented that the “ticket of admission” for her to think strategically was how well the people who reported to her were handling operational issues across the global organization. She was surprised at how few ties she had to break and how few impasses made it to her desk.

Shaving the Tiger: Understanding and Recalibrating the Default Setting of a Team

Part of understanding the collective self-knowledge that comprises the emotional intelligence (EI) of a team is to understand its default setting—what it is likely to do when under stress or operating on automatic pilot. Teams that have a history of operational focus go directly to the numbers and root-cause discussions when pressured. Health care teams almost immediately argue about outcomes and support these arguments with data (then often argue about whose data is better). This default setting is not unlike our individual default settings when under stress. Do I move toward or away from others when pressured? What happens to my ability to trust? How do I cover my derriere when under threat? We know from the studies on EI that self-awareness is the first key step in recognizing our own default settings. It is equally true, though sometimes more difficult to recognize, what a team’s default setting is when under the gun.

I was amazed (but somehow not surprised) to see, while watching a recent Animal Planet program, that when tigers are shaved, their stripes are also present in their skin. This says something about our fundamental personality or wiring, as the “who we are” goes deep—down to our very skins. Thus it is important to know (from an EI standpoint) who we are and what our default settings are likely to be individually and collectively. This is where people receive great value from leadership style instruments such as the Meyers-Briggs, Hogan Suite, CDR 3-D Suite, DISC®, and our Top Teaming Assessment.

Being “That” Person: Great Teams Need Great Leaders

While it would seem logical that great teams would be comprised of great leaders, this is not always the case. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that great teams are made up of people who are committed to being even better leaders—people who are conscious and deliberate about their own learning and effectiveness as leaders and equally committed to growing their understanding of how teams continue to grow and develop. Just as there is no one right type of team—the structure, makeup, and focus depend on what the strategy requires—it is equally true that there is no one right type of leader within a team. Leaders come in all sizes, shapes, and styles—from extroverted to introverted, from warm and caring to businesslike, from participative to command-and-control. What is true about good leaders who build and comprise great teams is that they are very aware of their leadership style and about what the team must continue to do. If they were to have an autopilot setting, it would be in the “off” position much of the time.

Seldom do good teams become great teams by accident. There is purposefulness about their evolution and a definite series of practices they follow. Think about any teams that have a moderate to high degree of interdependence—from sports teams to elite military teams. In most cases, they begin with people who are highly qualified and have earned their stripes by being serially successful at the fundamentals of their jobs. In their track records of success, they have learned to play well with others—to blend support of others with a tough-minded, edgy, playing-flat-out approach to the outside world. They push each one another and demand only the best. They almost always have a coach—either someone who has been there before or sees a future state and the road map to get there. Again, this is true in sports, the military, medicine, and business. There is someone or something that pushes the group to look more deeply and achieve more than they could have done by themselves.

Building Emotional, Relational, and Collective Intelligence

It is a given that leaders must know themselves and have the requisite emotional intelligence that allows them to understand their style, default settings, hot buttons, and hard wiring. What is less well understood is the importance of what we call relational intelligence, which is how we interact with others, understand the social/relational milieu, and communicate our histories, values, and intentions. This is where trust is built and absolutely critical when it comes to playing well and hard on teams. And this is mostly accomplished in informal settings, over lunch or an adult beverage. Leaders of highly diverse organizations and those in which people rotate on and off teams are extremely aware of the criticality of building these relationships. To the extent that we can develop the requisite EI and RI and then apply them within a global world, we become wiser human beings. And through fully integrating our own knowledge, specialization, and wisdom with that of the people we work with most closely, we can create and fully mine our collective intelligence (CI), which is the great differentiator between good teams and Top Teams. How we do this is largely dependent on creating a deliberate atmosphere, clear expectations, and agreed-upon processes that can drive requisite dialogue forward.

Demonstrating Courage in the Face of Uncertainty: Top Teams in Tough Times

There are no straight lines in the art and practice of leadership. It is in the constant journey of leaders and the learning that occurs through dialogue and correction that great teams get it (mostly) right. Leadership sets the tone for either candor or carefulness. Unresolved issues limit an executive team and restrict what is possible for the company. If you cannot talk about it, how can you address it and continually improve? On the Mississippi River, tugboat captains have the pattern intelligence that comes with navigating an organic and ever-changing system and the necessary willingness constantly to adjust to their environment. Thus it is with Top Teams in setting and following strategy within a flexible and movable environment. Flexibility wins, and dialogue is the currency of the land.

Creating and sustaining Top Teams is largely a dialogue process in which team members fully and completely talk about the stuff that matters. There is a Rule of One—that it only takes one person who knows something important and doesn’t get the full attention of his or her peers or partners to destroy a business, a space shuttle, or the credibility of leadership. So whom do the people at your level talk to? The obvious answer should be that you talk openly and honestly to one other. This dialogue builds trust, as leaders must be able to address anything and everything with one another. Yet, as stated earlier, this doesn’t always come easily or naturally, even for the best leaders.

Over the past twenty years, we have coached a lot of people across a wide range of industries. One of the things we quickly learned is that unless we understood the unique business the executives are in, with the specific demands, intellectual requirements, structure, strategic direction, organizational and cultural history, key players, and more, our effectiveness as an influencer of behavior and as an advisor was limited. Our clients were always the first ones to know that. So our strong belief, shaped by many years of doing this, is that good coaching always occurs in the context of a specific business, and in that unique milieu; those are the teams where the leaders sit. You have to know the territory.

Without question, one of the most important responsibilities of leadership teams is to develop the next generation of leaders. But how good is their thinking about developing the next generation of teams? Do they (or do you) spend the time and resources and possible investment to build team capabilities one to three levels down the organization? Are future leaders exposed to the organization’s strategic worldview and to emerging trends and technologies? Do they have a point of view about leadership that compels them to look both inside and relationally, at EI and RI? No doubt future leaders and high performers have to perform well and execute flawlessly, but how well are they trained to be more deliberate, conscious, and disciplined members of Top Teams? These competencies are of increasing importance as Hi-Pos move up the organization and hold roles of greater importance. Those high-potential leaders who master the skills needed to build and operate within Top Teams are poised to make a real difference in their business, their career, and for the enterprise.

With executives stressed beyond comprehension, due to the increased complexity, volatility, ambiguity, and rate of change within the world of business, leaders within Top Teams have a responsibility to be straightforward and demanding with clear expectations of one another. This is yet they must be aware of the humanity and personal sacrifice entailed in such leadership and look for the opportunities to support one another in this adventure.

Lawrence S. Levin is founder and senior partner of The Levin Group LLC, a consulting and advisory firm with over twenty years of experience in improving senior team effectiveness, organizational performance, and leadership solutions for CEOs, top executives, and senior teams. Larry specializes in working with leadership teams in Fortune 500 companies and mid-sized organizations on understanding and improving the dynamics and capabilities of executive teams, utilizing team-based interventions and coaching to drive business success and improve C-level effectiveness. He also specializes in accelerating significant change within complicated systems, usually as a result of rapid growth, major technology insertions, mergers and acquisitions, and other complex culture changing initiatives. Larry is a frequent speaker at conferences and association meetings. He has been featured on CNN as well as other national and local media, and has written for many publications. His book Top Teaming: A Roadmap for Teams Navigating the Now, the New, and the Next was published in June 2011.

Notes

1. Mickey Connolly & Richard Rianoshek, The Communication Catalyst: The Fast (But Not Stupid) Track to Value for Customers, Investors, and Employees (Chicago: Dearborn Trade, 2002), 145.

2. Marshall Goldsmith, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There (New York: Hyperion, 2007).

3. Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap . . . and Others Don’t (New York: HarperCollins, 2001).