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Archive for January, 2010

Can This Team Be Saved?

In Teamwork on January 25, 2010 at 8:16 am

Last week, I ended with a reference to the Ladies Home Journal column called, “Can this marriage be saved” and wondered if we needed a new column called, “Can this team be saved?”

Well, consider this the first installment.

When I meet people, I ask them to tell me about their organizations, and the senior executive team.  Often, they’ll joke and ask if I want them to “lie down and start at the beginning?”

I’ve heard all kinds of things, like:

  • Our CEO has a different strategy every day … he has A.D.D.
  • Our CEO is incredibly out of touch … but refuses to listen to anything negative.
  • My vice president walks around the office bad-mouthing the other executives.
  • Our executives fight all the time … I’m not sure they agree on anything.
  • One of our VPs is totally passive-aggressive.  He is calm in the meeting but goes off the reservation afterwards.

So, can teams like these be saved?  Unfortunately, the answer is, “Maybe … IF they are willing to do the hard work required to change.”  Many will say that they are willing to change, but give up when the going gets tough.

The first step is a brutally honest assessment of the organization’s performance.  If you are losing market share and heading downhill fast, you have to face the facts.  If your executive team is passive-aggressive, you have to call it like it is.

The next step is to engage some outside help.  An outsider can be the voice of reason.  They can be the referee when meetings get hostile.  They can hold people accountable.  Of course, you have to give the outsider the authority to play this role.

Finally, you must “get the wrong executives off the bus.”  This can be really hard, especially when an executive has been part of the team for a long time.  Even harder when the executive is “delivering the numbers.”  But, you have to deal with the problem people, because they bring everyone else down.

I’ve been part of this process many times, both as a consultant and as an executive.  Reflecting back on my experience, the success rate is about 50%.    Not great … but not hopeless either.

Stay tuned for details about a new web site dedicated to this issue:  www.canthisteambesaved.com.

The Shift Points blog is designed for Fast Lane leaders who want to leave their competitors in the dust.

Shift Your Thinking.  Accelerate Your Results.

1+1+1+1+1+1=3

In Leadership, Teamwork on January 18, 2010 at 6:19 am

In Jon Katzenbach’s well researched book, Teams at the Top, he differentiates between “single-leader working groups” and “performance-driven teams.”

And in my experience, we need a third category, “Dysfunctional, non-working groups.”  In these groups, the sum is less than the parts.

Too often, the most dysfunctional team in an organization is the executive team.  In fact, the employee engagement research suggests that most employees do not trust their executives to do the right thing.

These groups are characterized by low trust, infighting, back-stabbing, and undermining.

At the executive meeting, everyone is partially checked-out.  They don’t fully engage, but wait until after the meeting to start undermining the decisions.

They complain about the other executives behind their backs.   Executive A is convinced that Executive B is “the wrong person on the bus,” and vice versa.

There is also a decided lack of accountability.  Since no one owns anything, no one takes the heat.

Often every executive has a different compensation plan, each driven by different performance factors.  Sometimes, the compensation plan creates a zero-sum-game where it is impossible for everyone to win.

Growing up, my mom subscribed to the Ladies Home Journal, which featured a column called, “Can this marriage be saved?”

Maybe we need a new column, “Can this team be saved?”

The Shift Points blog is designed for Fast Lane leaders who want to leave their competitors in the dust.

Shift Your Thinking.  Accelerate Your Results.

“But he has nothing on!”

In Leadership on January 11, 2010 at 6:20 am

Perhaps one of the greatest management lessons ever written was The Emperor’s New Clothes by Hans Christian Andersen.

You all know the story.  The King buys a new, custom-made suit from two swindlers posing as weavers.  The suit was to be made of a material that “possessed the wonderful quality of being invisible to any man who was unfit for his office or unpardonably stupid.”

Although it is a sham, everyone is afraid to admit it, for fear that they themselves would look stupid.  Even worse, they are afraid to tell the king.  Only a little child breaks the chain of self-deception, and even then, the King refuses to listen.

Many organizations suffer from exactly this problem.  The CEO loves himself more than anything else.  He chases fanciful new ideas, convinced of their brilliance.  He hires only yes-men who will tell him what he wants to hear.  And he creates an environment where everyone is afraid to tell them the truth.

Often, like the king, they even refuse to listen to the wisdom of an outsider, who like the little child, has no reason to lie.

In Good to Great, Jim Collins admonishes us to “confront the brutal facts.”

Maybe now would be a good time to reexamine your organization.  Have you created an environment of self-deception?  Are people afraid to tell you the truth?  Do you “shoot the messenger?”

Shift Your Thinking.  Accelerate Your Results.

For those who want to read the whole story, you can find it here:

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Clothes

Why Smart Executives Fail

In Leadership on January 4, 2010 at 3:06 pm

Over the course of my career, both as a consultant and as an executive, I have worked with dozens of smart leaders who failed.

Some of these executives drove their organizations into the ground, some created massive morale problems, others simply failed to face reality. Most simply refused to listen.

A great book, Why Smart Executives Fail, by Sydney Finkelstein, is a fantastic, fact-based look at this problem. I highly recommend it for the rare leader who is serious about building a high-performance organization. (In my experience, most executives simply don’t care about their organizations, they only care about themselves.)

Here is a great quote that nets it out:

“We discovered that precipitous business failures are caused by four destructive patterns of behavior that set in, without anyone noticing them, well before a business goes under. These four syndromes involve (1) flawed executive mind-sets that throw off a company’s perception of reality, (2) delusional attitudes that keep this attitude in place, (3) breakdowns in communications systems developed to handle potentially urgent information, and (4) leadership qualities that keep a company’s executives from correcting their course.

In Good to Great, Jim Collins speaks of the “mirror and the window” when describing the behavior of Level 4 leaders.

Maybe it is time for all of you to take a long, hard, and brutally honest look in the mirror.