Being "Great"
Friday, September 02, 2005
I was talking with a client the other day about the team she manages. She is the leader of a team of about 10 managers/directors for a consumer products company on the West coast. She just inherited four managers from another division that was merged into her group.
She wanted me to come in and do some work with her and the whole team – your basic teambuilding kind of thing. I asked her if she was worried about creating a safe environment for the discussion about what’s working and what’s not, as well as the roles people need to play in order for the team to be successful. She said she really wasn’t
“No, we have a lot of really open and frank discussions in my group and in our meetings,” she told me. “People really say what they think without being afraid.”
“Really,” I said with a noticeable amount of surprise. I realized in that moment how accustomed I’ve become to the presence of fear and mistrust with just about every team of people I work with.
“So, what has made your team function so ‘normally,’ without the same baggage of fear being dragged around into every single conversation, email, and interaction,” I asked.
She thought for a moment. “Well, I guess that I created it.”
It was that simple. I probed a bit further into her perception of the safe team and heard what she had done to make this possible. What it came down to, in my assessment at least, was her openness to being wrong some of the time, knowing that other people on her team saw things differently than she did, that they had ideas that may be different and better than hers, and that she was truly, genuinely committed to the group and the company’s success, as opposed to her own.
Jim Collins, in Good to Great, talks about how the leaders of the historically top-performing companies look at themselves when searching for answers as to why things went wrong and look out the window (at other) when searching for the reasons why things went right. My take on this is that great leaders are open to their own accountability, as well as understanding that many outside people and forces need to play a role in achieving success.
It was a great reminder to me to see someone who was really doing things right. It’s unfortunate that so many leaders get caught up in being closed to others, in looking to reap the big reward in success and cover their own asses in defeat. Of course, I usually want to know why – what else is going on that forces this protective dynamic, with my eye on figuring out how to create an environment where things can go right.
MB
She wanted me to come in and do some work with her and the whole team – your basic teambuilding kind of thing. I asked her if she was worried about creating a safe environment for the discussion about what’s working and what’s not, as well as the roles people need to play in order for the team to be successful. She said she really wasn’t
“No, we have a lot of really open and frank discussions in my group and in our meetings,” she told me. “People really say what they think without being afraid.”
“Really,” I said with a noticeable amount of surprise. I realized in that moment how accustomed I’ve become to the presence of fear and mistrust with just about every team of people I work with.
“So, what has made your team function so ‘normally,’ without the same baggage of fear being dragged around into every single conversation, email, and interaction,” I asked.
She thought for a moment. “Well, I guess that I created it.”
It was that simple. I probed a bit further into her perception of the safe team and heard what she had done to make this possible. What it came down to, in my assessment at least, was her openness to being wrong some of the time, knowing that other people on her team saw things differently than she did, that they had ideas that may be different and better than hers, and that she was truly, genuinely committed to the group and the company’s success, as opposed to her own.
Jim Collins, in Good to Great, talks about how the leaders of the historically top-performing companies look at themselves when searching for answers as to why things went wrong and look out the window (at other) when searching for the reasons why things went right. My take on this is that great leaders are open to their own accountability, as well as understanding that many outside people and forces need to play a role in achieving success.
It was a great reminder to me to see someone who was really doing things right. It’s unfortunate that so many leaders get caught up in being closed to others, in looking to reap the big reward in success and cover their own asses in defeat. Of course, I usually want to know why – what else is going on that forces this protective dynamic, with my eye on figuring out how to create an environment where things can go right.
MB
