Chapter 2
Step Two: Assembling and Unifying Your Leadership Team
If you are proposing a large-scale change in your organization, you are undoubtedly passionate about how necessary it is and about crafting a breakthrough vision for the future. But it will be an uphill battle, often more difficult and prone to failure than you may anticipate. No matter how compelling the need and how strong your passion for making the change, achieving and sustaining breakthrough change will require much more than just your passion. No great change has ever been accomplished by one leader alone: one person's skill, charisma, and sheer energy are simply not enough. Leaders must rely on a well-balanced leadership team. Some have the luxury (and responsibility) of hand-selecting this team. Some leaders are brought in to work with an existing group that may or may not already function as a team. Whether you've recruited your own team, inherited one, or face some combination of both, it's your job to actively develop and unify a group that will guide the organization in making your change a reality. This chapter will show you how to do just that.
Stacking the Deck is focused on leading change from within existing organizations that already have histories and processes in place. But whether in the start-up world or in established organizations, the people who most successfully initiate change are the ones who are inspired and fulfilled by being part of something new, challenging, and important. The team that got us to the moon didn't get a billion dollar bonus, even if they might have deserved it. They didn't undertake the project because they expected a big bonus. They devoted themselves to it because it sparked their imaginations and made them feel a part of something much larger and greater than themselves.
Breakthrough change requires that you define the future by imagining a full range of possibilities. It extends beyond making incremental changes in the current reality and often well beyond the comfort zone. Your leadership team must include people who are convinced that the change is both economically and strategically important, despite the barriers and challenges you'll face in undertaking it.
Asking people to come on board is asking them to sign on for something that by its very nature is going to be hard. A big change will always require more resources than you will have available. It will take an enormous amount of time and energy, which have to be mustered against long odds and over a long period. You are looking for pioneers, for people who are comfortable with a greater degree of risk than the average person.
Find and Nurture the Pioneers
You must be able to inspire passion in the members of your team and feel confident that they are in turn capable of kindling that spark and dedication in others. Everyone has to be on board. As Starbucks chief executive officer Howard Schultz shared, “You can't achieve bold change if there are people within the organization who doubt its intent and don't feel as if they're part of the idea or the solution, the tactic, and ultimately the decision.” You simply can't lead bold change by yourself. Instead, Howard emphasized, you need “a level of consensus and a wide swath of people who believe in the idea and are willing to go to the mat or take the hill. Getting people to believe and having them be ‘all in’ is key.”
When you are creating your leadership team and looking for people to help you make this change happen, consider four key elements:
- Skill
- Experience
- Enthusiasm
- Team fit
Naturally, you want to select people with specialized skill sets and experience in the kind of project you're undertaking. Attitude, as reflected in character, enthusiasm, and team fit, is critical when it comes to change. But the surprising truth is that enthusiasm and team fit may be the most challenging elements to locate.
You need people who are willing to enter unmapped terrain. These pioneers will guide your larger team, usher your change into reality, and serve as ambassadors to the rest of the organization.
Having many of your core group of excited believers come from current staff, embedded as they are within the corporate culture, can be extraordinarily helpful. Your believers are the ideological “early adopters” who can form an all-important bridge between management and the people on the ground who may be skeptical of the change you are driving.
Be sure to dedicate enough of your time and energy to forming the team. You may feel rushed to get the change moving and be tempted to gloss over team formation. But countless transformations have stalled out or even collapsed because very smart, highly motivated, enormously dedicated people thought that they could translate anything they attempted into success. We all want to believe that if we're smart enough and work hard enough, we can do anything we put our minds to. In my experience, and the experience of all the people I've interviewed and known, this is almost never true. Attitude is critical, but it's not sufficient. Leaders must find people with the relevant experience, and very often—particularly with breakthrough change—that means going outside to recruit the key talent that's needed.
Bringing Outside Experience In
Adding one or two new people from outside the organization can strengthen the team. The experiences—whether successes, failures, or both—that new people bring to the mix can benefit the group and facilitate the change. Bringing in new talent, especially a new executive, is not without risks of its own. Cultural adaptation can be a delicate and perilous process, and you will need to be cognizant of potential interpersonal issues as well as the attitude of any new hires.
Years ago I recruited an enormously talented person for a high-level function, so high that his role made him part of the leadership team. I knew that he had produced brilliant work in the past, and that proved true with us. There was no denying that he was enormously successful at producing breakthrough ideas and concepts. But his bad attitude outweighed the skills he brought to the company. He treated our vendors and our employees with disrespect. He was completely insufferable. No one liked him—and with good cause.
At first I thought I could solve the problem with counseling. I sat him down and explained how his behavior was alienating people, wasn't appropriate for the workplace, and undermined our mission. Over and over, I gave him instruction and advice, but none of it ever seemed to stick.
With the clarity of an outsider, my wife was always telling me that I should just let him go. “That guy is a jerk!” she said. “Just by keeping him around, you are undermining your values. And everyone is watching you.” I couldn't deny that she was right. In hiring him, I had assumed a set of shared values. Incorrectly, as it turned out. In keeping him on, I had compromised my values—and Schwab's. In retrospect, I definitely let him get away with his negative behavior for far too long. Eventually, I did the right thing and let him go.
About a year later, I got a call from a senior executive at a Fortune 500 company. “Dave,” he said, “I hired a guy a few months ago who used to work for you at Schwab.”
“So I understand,” I responded. “How's he doing?”
“Well, he's doing great work, but . . .” And I knew exactly what I was going to hear next. He was doing great work, but everyone hated working with him. He was making enemies every time he turned around, and he was eroding team morale. “How do you manage that?” the new boss asked.
“You can't,” I said. “Here's my prediction: you will try very hard to get him to change, and he won't. You'll tolerate it until the heat in the organization becomes so great that you realize your own credibility is being threatened. People will start to wonder why you don't just fire him. And then, you will. Just like I did. And you will regret having waited so long.”
Needless to say, my colleague on the other end of the phone didn't find this answer very comforting. I had spent months trying to coach a talented but difficult executive into being the team member I needed him to be; but the fact was, he was a solo operator who poisoned everyone around him and who saw no need to change. To no one's surprise, he was fired from his new job a few months later.
Every leader encounters this kind of challenging situation at one point or another. In an ideal world, you would have the time to get a clear sense of character before hiring someone. Unfortunately, the skills we need don't always come perfectly packaged with a great personality, good character, and a team-first mentality. When a huge, challenging initiative is staring you in the face, the temptation may be to recruit someone with hard-to-find skills while overlooking what may be questionable character traits. It's only natural: when you find a candidate with the skills you desperately need, you don't want to find any reason not to hire that person. If the new hire then gets off to a shaky start with the team, it's easy to chalk it up to adjustment jitters rather than face the fact that you may have made a hiring mistake. However, it is always better to identify these problems early and deal with them before they fester, since without intervention the problem will only get worse.
A toxic person who does great work may make you look good for a while. But bear in mind that even with counseling and training, when people are under pressure they often default to old, negative habits. Let this go on too long and your own leadership will soon be called into question: what kind of leader sacrifices the unity and cohesion of the team? Do corporate values matter or don't they? In the end, unless the person genuinely acknowledges the need to change and is willing to put in the considerable effort required, keeping these types of people around is usually not worth the cost to the team and to the organization. Making compromises on character to get the skills you need rarely works out. Be sure to get a clear sense of character before hiring someone. And if you make a mistake, deal with it quickly.
Reconfiguring the Team, as Needed
Of course, there is a difference between someone who is never going to be a team player and someone who is simply on the wrong team. Let's say you introduce a new person into a group of people who have all been working together for 10 years. You can expect that the team will be a bit disrupted initially and that some clashes of personality will arise either with or because of the new member. Sometimes, however, like trading athletes to a different team, when you move people into a different group the fresh start allows them to blossom. It's reasonable to try a new situation for someone who is not working out, as long as the person's fundamental attitude, level of commitment, and work product merit the benefit of the doubt.
Then there are the famously challenging people who will either take most of a project on their own shoulders or build a specialized team around them that can tolerate—or even thrive under—a demanding, potentially hostile boss. More often than not these people do not succeed because they require such a unique hothouse atmosphere to do their work. Like much of our role as leaders, managing difficult personalities is a delicate balance.
Take Steps to Unify the Team
Even with the right people, you have to unify the team and manage your people in the right way. True teamwork—real, effective cooperation and communication between team members—is rare and it's a huge edge that you will need when embarking on a breakthrough change initiative. More than the plans you develop or the financial resources at your disposal, it's your people and the way you lead them that will make the difference.
How you behave as a leader and as a team player is both critical and too easily overlooked (but not by the team). Although most people describe themselves as team players, this often means, “I love teams, as long as they follow all of my suggestions.” Much as I hate to admit it, that quote could have been from me in the earlier stages of my career, when I functioned largely on my own and then as the head of teams in a management capacity. But the shift from being a solo manager leading a team to being a manager of a larger operation is minor when compared to the monumental shift of managing an operation and being part of an executive team. That next level—when you're working on an executive team with colleagues—can present an entirely different set of challenges and require a new set of skills.
Fortunately, having recognized that our team needed help, our boss brought in a leadership coach to work with the entire team. I soon realized just how desperately I was in need of remedial help. It's not easy to change and it certainly wasn't easy to let go of my desire to control all the elements of any major initiative. My executive coaches, including Terry Pearce, encouraged me to confront this weakness, and I've worked hard at improving. Those experiences all underlie the importance of making a constant effort to surround yourself with talent and working at improving yourself and others in the process.
One way to gauge your own ability is to ask your team to give you the answers to the following questions, on a periodic basis:
- What do I do particularly well that I should do more of and build on?
- What do I do poorly that is hurting the team and needs my attention and commitment to change?
- How could I do better? What actions would help me improve and improve our team performance?
- What do I spend my time on that I need to do more of?
- What do I spend time and energy on that I need to do less of, delegate to someone else, or stop altogether?
- How else could I improve my performance and that of our team?
Your team needs to know that you'll treat their answers as constructive and strictly anonymous. With that understanding, they may deliver up some surprising answers. Be sure to have a session with the team in which you review the feedback and let them know what you plan to do to respond to their suggestions. You have asked for help and your credibility will rest on the humility, candor, and follow-through you demonstrate in your response.
If reading your team's input is difficult for you, take particular care in preparing yourself for this meeting. The team will be waiting to see how you handle their feedback. The more difficult the feedback, the more important that you demonstrate a genuine desire to improve and gratitude for the team members' honesty. How you initiate the conversation, how you express yourself, how you frame any follow-up questions of your own or from the team, even how you carry yourself: every detail speaks volumes. If you have a leadership coach or other outside resource, talk through the meeting in advance, in detail. Understand that this follow-up meeting is an opportunity to improve yourself, recognize and model the value of candor, and build trust. The grace with which you handle this conversation is crucial for you and for the team.
If continuous personal improvement is one of your goals, try to keep current in works on business management and leadership—and to read the ones with lasting value. For anyone who is or aspires to be a leader, I recommend Patrick Lencioni's best-selling book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable. Lencioni describes major dysfunctions that may threaten to destroy any team; he presents these dysfunctions as a sort of cascade. Number one, absence of trust, fuels number two, fear of conflict; fear of conflict then fuels lack of commitment. Eventually you cascade further into avoidance of accountability and finally inattention to results, and your team and its mission are in shambles. This progression has been reflected time and again in my personal experience and in that of hundreds of executives I have taught over the years. Encountering any of these dysfunctions is not necessarily a red flag that you've selected the wrong people or screwed something up along the way. It may simply be a natural part of learning to trust, which is absolutely foundational.
Building Trust
Absence of trust is the source of a lot of team dysfunction, and establishing trust must start when a team is first formed. In fact, this is how you begin to build a high-functioning team.
The first time I went to an executive offsite where we were asked to talk about ourselves, our life story, our passions, our hopes, and dreams, I thought to myself, “I can't believe we are wasting time on this nonsense. Let's discuss what we need to work on to drive our growing success!” I didn't think my impatience was unusual; I expected that most hard-driving executives also viewed this kind of stuff as a giant waste of time. But I was wrong. As it turned out, many of my presumptions about other people were off the mark, sometimes even by 180 degrees.
Getting people together and encouraging them to talk about themselves can in fact be a great trust builder—when done well. The leader's job hinges on enabling people to understand each other, to understand their motivations and their character. Your team members reveal themselves when they speak. They explain where they're coming from and discuss the experiences that have shaped them. Trust and cooperation can grow. On the flip side, some people use sharing opportunities to tell self-aggrandizing stories that actually foster resentment. It's important to shape and drive these situations to make sure that the stories actually bring people together rather than create walls between them. Since not every executive has the skills to lead such a discussion, investing in an experienced facilitator can be very worthwhile.
Team members need to get to know each other. Spending time in an offsite setting allows people to discover the experiences that have shaped others' skills and perspectives, and to understand others' personal values. Even though an offsite may at times appear as a mere respite from the office, the time spent building the team, working on team dynamics, and learning why a specific initiative is worthy of the team's time and energy is far from some boondoggle. The trust we need for driving change will come when we understand each other's motivations, the why behind what we do. Without that insight, people can too often ascribe words and actions to the wrong motivation and thus resist change. Spending time together enables that understanding and rapport to develop. Lencioni's book offers some suggestions on team building, as do other books in the market. Team-building efforts are an important investment and part of the process of building trust.
Facing Conflict
It is not easy to face conflicts without first establishing trust. Trust is more than a feeling of security or an absence of fear. Trust enables assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, motivation, and truthfulness of others. If you do not establish trust—both between yourself and your team and among individual team members—a fear of conflict will dominate team members' interactions. Recognize that trust and fear are especially closely linked and that fear stunts meaningful dialogue. To have real discussions that get at real concerns, team members have to be willing to confront one another and resolve any conflicts. Your job is to create an environment where people feel safe doing so without fearing personal reprisals or punishment. People need time together and shared experiences for trust to grow, for getting comfortable with others' motivations, character, and intent. If you don't create that safe environment, you'll wind up with a team full of people going out of their way to avoid conflicts, people who are more interested in not rocking the boat than in fully exploring potential problems.
There's no one right way to create a safe environment for dialogue; each corporate culture is different. In some places you may find a very lively, almost combative culture of debate; in others, politeness is highly valued. Of course, there are larger cultural differences to think of as well. The issues of fear and conflict and how to deal with them are fundamentally different in an American corporation versus a Chinese corporation, for example. As with all the issues ahead of you, you have to devise a solution that fits the context. Once you have established a foundation of trust and constructive conflict, resistance decreases and processes move more smoothly.
Focusing the Leadership Team
You cannot achieve team unity overnight. We don't have one meeting or one team-building retreat and then pledge our undying commitment to one another and to the change initiative. But we can begin the process, and urge people toward a place where they understand debate and discussion not as personal attack but as a vital part of working through issues and refining the change. In doing so, we will also combine our efforts into focusing on commitment, accountability, and results to ensure the long-range success of the change.
These are topics that are front of mind for many leaders. Among the challenges that Debby Hopkins faces at Citi is finding ways to get one of the world's largest banks to innovate—both around the world and ahead of smaller, more nimble competitors. As she said, “When I think of experiences that I had 10 years ago versus now, the impact of disruption driven by technology, regulatory changes, and globalization creates a far more complicated landscape to traverse.”
Our conversation turned to deepening our understanding of how people work, individually and as part of a team. We were aiming at the same target, just using slightly different tools.
Understanding Work Styles
Debby told her leadership team that she wanted to do something to bring the team together and help them function more effectively, and to think about how each member works individually. As she said, “One option was the classic Myers-Briggs assessment. But I suspect it's an outdated tool.” She learned of a comparatively new system that the company's recruiters had just been starting to use and were finding very powerful. “It's called the Style of Influence—and exactly what we do is try to influence things,” she said. “It's an incredibly impactful exercise that takes very little time to complete. In fact, you can go online and do it in about 10 or 12 minutes.”
To hear Debby explain it, the new tool was, over and over again, nailing people's preferred style of operating, so much so that the entire team engaged in this powerful exercise. Our increased understanding of all of the types of people on the team can overcome what may seem to be insurmountable odds en route to success. These efforts together give us a better chance at being successful in finding a path to the future.
Understanding Team Dynamics
Debby is certainly not alone in her search for ways to unify and improve her team. Team dynamics can make all the difference. The number of systems and organizations focused on team dynamics is some indicator that getting those dynamics right is not necessarily a smooth journey. The notion that a team gets better simply by working together is not necessarily true. Practice alone simply can't get you there unless you're practicing the right skills and at the appropriate level. Practicing the wrong skills with the wrong dynamics can lead straight to a dead end.
Team leaders are wise to drive continuous improvement of their teams by measuring and assessing their team dynamics. Changing behavior is difficult, and without compelling, actionable feedback it is virtually impossible.
A variety of systems are available to help focus leaders on areas of interpersonal dynamics that have the biggest impact on business performance and output. Often team members provide feedback on the team leader and rate their team on carefully defined attributes of a high-performing team. The results can help the leader and the team members recognize areas for improvement and set goals for improving. I recently employed a tool called Team Insights™ that measures levels of collaboration, engagement, morale, and trust and allows teams to focus their efforts on areas of weakness. This book's website provides links to some of the tools that might help leaders understand and improve the workings of their teams.
You need to assemble, build, and strengthen the leadership team, always making it clear what the team has been convened to do. One function it is not charged with is making final decisions. A team exists to perfect the change, but even the best of teams require you to take point on the major decisions. A mentor's simple phrase still rings in my head: “A voice is not a vote.” A voice is an opportunity to raise objections and make suggestions. It is not a vote, and a leadership team is not a democracy.
This is where the idea of commitment comes in. You need to stand behind each decision you make and consistently carry out the plan you've all developed. The commitment starts at the top with you and then spreads out through the rest of the team.
You do have the final say, and that should be clear to your team members. But the more these individuals contribute to a plan, the more personally invested they become. And this is where accountability comes in. If a team develops a plan for change and commits to carrying it out, then all members ideally have a stake in it. Cultivating a sense of ownership in the debate process can increase each person's sense of responsibility for resultant decisions. And in the long term, that will encourage everyone's attention to the results.
With your leadership team now assembled and unified, you are ready for the hard work ahead. You've established the need and urgency for change in Chapter 1 and have begun assembling and unifying the leadership team in Chapter 2. You now need to craft your compelling vision of the future. That's the subject of Chapter 3.