There is a trend I’ve been seeing lately when I facilitate Culture Strategy sessions with senior leadership teams. They aren’t acting as a team. This shows up as conflicting priorities that filters throughout the organization. It sometimes shows up as lack of empathy towards each other. Sometimes it is a pervasive feeling that they haven’t had a chance to “really” talk in ages.
In one company, the senior team has worked together for many years. They trust and respect and genuinely like each other. But they’re all running, very fast, in their own little part of the company. They have weekly information update meetings and no real discussion. They think they’re aligned, but they don’t have a clear direction and their teams are getting mixed messages.
In another team, some leaders have worked together in the company for many years, Others are new and have a very different style. The CEO of the company knows culture change is needed. He has brought these new leaders in to help move the company forward, but that isn’t clear, and there is a feeling of “us vs them.”
With another team, there are a few smaller groups within the larger senior team, who make decisions that impact everyone without input or discussion. This causes frustration and lack of trust for the group. In fact, a study done through MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory found that when there are teams within teams, with uneven communication across all team members, performance suffers.
Still other teams see weekly senior team meetings as a nuisance that gets in the way of them getting their work done.
In Patrick Lencioni’s book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, the leader asks her senior team a question:
Who is your first team?
This question is one that senior leaders need to examine. If you’re finding cases of silo mentality or conflicting objectives, chances are people are thinking of the team that reports to them as their “first team.” If you want an aligned organization where everyone is pitching in to achieve the top objectives, the senior team of people, representing various business lines or departments, needs to be the “first team.”
When the senior team is the first team, people find ways to make that team successful. That means focusing attention on something that wasn’t a department-specific priority but is a big win for the organization as a whole. It means having company wide priorities versus department specific ones. And it means that other teams within the organization are more willing and focused on helping each other with the big bets for the entire company.
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