Coaching Leadership Teams Part 2

The quality of teamwork achieved by an executive team has an enormous impact on business success. So it makes sense to invest in coaching the team to be healthy and high performing.  In the second instalment of this two-episode special, Gerard shares stories and insights into some of the reasons why executive teams need help, and ways in which leadership teams can conquer dysfunction and achieve higher levels of success.

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Transcript

It's not about the ordinary. We've got enough of that. It's about the extraordinary. And we need more. 

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Hi there. I'm Gerard Penna. And welcome to the extraordinary latest podcast where we spend time with recognized leaders and global experts exploring the art and science of remarkable leadership. 

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Welcome to the extraordinary leaders podcast. I'm Gerard Penna and I'm your host. This is episode three of Season three, and this is the continuation of the 12 Rules for Coaching Leadership Teams. In the last episode, I shared with you the first six rules, and in this episode I'm going to share with you the next six rules. And I hope that you're getting something from this because I feel like I'm providing a quite a unique insight into the sort of work that I do with leadership teams, which not only reveals my approach, but also reveals something about what I see going on within leadership teams. 

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And that's something that most people don't get to see if they're not part of that team. You know, it's usually behind closed doors that these teams meet. The dynamics are not necessarily played out in the open. Yet, nonetheless, most people in the organization are going to feel the effects of these dynamics, whether they're helpful or unhelpful. So for you, if you're aspiring to be a senior leader or in the future, you're going to be working with a leadership team, then hopefully some of the insights and the lessons that I'm sharing with you will be useful. 

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So hang around. I'm sure it's going to be a great episode. 

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So here are rules 7 to 12 from 12 rules for coaching leadership teams. 

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Rule number seven. Team's challenges are both technical and adaptive. I like using the language derived from adaptive leadership theory and practice, as taught by Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky at Harvard University. For those of you who have read my book, you might have noted Marty's kind comments at the beginning of the book. I have a lot of respect for Marty and Ron, particularly in their ability to have put a name to experiences that we're having and helping us see things in a systemic way. 

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One of the most helpful things that they helped us do was to distinguish between adaptive challenges and technical problems. A technical problem is one for which we can easily diagnose the problem and prescribe an answer. And if we don't know the answer, there's usually an expert available who can help fix it quickly. An adaptive challenge, however, is harder to diagnose, and finding a solution requires ongoing experiments and learning to make problems. So there are some team problems that can be reasonably easy to fix in Harvard class them as technical problems, for example, having appropriate meeting disciplines so that the teams stay focused and effective and efficient decision rights and accountability. 

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So you can run processes like RACI that allow you to get very great clarity around who's responsible or accountable for what and how you manage those sort of border issues. But there are also many team issues that have adaptive elements, and these are problems for which there is no easy answer. And making progress usually requires someone to have to incur a loss. And if you want to dig a bit more into this notion of adaptive challenges, have a listen to one of the earlier episodes that I had a conversation with Robbie McPherson, because we tend to talk a bit about adaptive challenges and the notions of loss associated with that. 

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A good example of the sort of loss that often has to be incurred within a team when they're confronting an adaptive challenge would be that work of collaboration, genuine collaboration and working at an enterprise level rather than pursuing and representing the interests of only their own teams or their own functions. Working in that enterprise first way and collaborating actually requires them to prioritise what is most important for the enterprise and then allocate the scarce resources or the limited resources of the enterprise against those things. 

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So it might be financial capital or it might be something like attentional capital. That is how much attention the leadership team or the leadership group can pay to the different things that are going on in the organisation. And there's a finite amount of that attentional capital. So when you prioritise, when you decide as a group what's most important, what you're saying is we're going to allocate not just financial capital but our attentional capital to that. And that means because it's a finite resource, we are not going to do a whole bunch of things. 

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There's a number of pet projects or things that we think are priorities within our own areas that we might choose or not be able to back. And so as a team member of a leadership team, I need to be prepared that once we've made a decision about what we are going to invest in, that I understand that that means that I have therefore may have lost the right to invest in some other stuff that I might have thought was important, but it clearly is further down the priority list. That is an adaptive element. So it's an adaptive element in many ways for a lot of teams because that requires that process requires a significant amount of fierce debate. 

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You know, you know, often a lot of heat in the conversation as people are arguing for different things and they're putting their best argument forward. And then what it also takes, which is adaptive, which teams have to learn how to actually become and be. This is to then once you've decided on something that you then commit to it, you don't. You lose the right, you don't have the right to say yes and then go away and do something different. To actually commit to something that the team has decided is most important. And then go back into your own area and represent that decision. 

00:06:01:12 - 00:06:25:11>

And knowing that there might be people from your own area, from your own team, your own function that might be unhappy with the fact that something they're working on has been deprioritized or will no longer have the attention or the the capital that was previously allocated to it. And that's an adaptive challenge for many leaders as well to to disappoint the expectations of the people from their own tribe. 

00:06:27:02 - 00:06:58:12>

And that's why adaptive challenges are often the harder part of team development, because there's no easy answer. Each team has to find its own way to being able to evolve its way of thinking and its way of being and its way of operating. To embrace some of these more, shall we call functional high performance team behaviors. And it doesn't happen easily. It doesn't happen sometimes the first time. Sometimes the team has to have multiple goes at it and fail before it learns how to do it. 

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So that entire team has to be willing to run a series of experiments to resolve and learn enough and make sustained effort over months. Or in some cases, maybe it's a year to fully realize the benefits of that change that they're trying to make in the way that they operate. So that means I'm especially cautious when a client seems to be seeking a silver bullet and expects that I have one in my pocket and that there are some problems that we're going to have solved really quickly. That might be true for some issues, technical problems, but certainly not necessarily going to be true for a bunch of adaptive challenges. 

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Rule number eight. Explains why adaptive challenges are so hard. And that's often because adaptive challenges require a high level of trust for a team to engage with the process of experimentation and learning to find their way through these challenges. So rule number eight is it all starts with trust. For a team to work, the team members have to trust each other's competence and their intentions. So there's two things there that are really important. And I point to this very clearly in my book, Extraordinary Leaders, because the research is absolutely clear on this. 

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More than 50 years of research and social psychology tells us that our brains are wired to make assessments of other people in two areas. What are their intentions towards me and are they competent? 

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Team members have to trust each other's intentions and they have to trust each other's competence. They have to trust that the other members of the team have their own, their best interests at heart, each other's interests at heart, not just their own. And they have to trust that they have the competence to be able to carry those out. And what I notice is that most team problems arise from an erosion or an absence of trust in one or both of these domains. So if people don't trust each other's intentions, they're going to be protective. They're not going to share openly. They're not going to be vulnerable. They're not going to ask for help. 

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They're not going to declare when they're having a problem, when they are unable to fulfill a commitment that they made to the team, they're likely to want to hide that or not acknowledge that openly. If there's an absence of trust, they might not be willing to engage in fierce debate where there's kind of fierce debate, where it's the heat that's generated is actually transformative, where the the battle of ideas and the battle of perspectives, not the battle of people and wills and egos, but the battle of ideas and perspectives is sufficient to generate something new and transformative out of it. And of course, an absence of trust of each other's competence means that no one's going to really lean into each other and actually assume that they're going to be able to do what needs to be done. 

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They're usually not going to listen to each other. They're not going to actually listen deeply and hear what's being said and incorporate that that information or that knowledge or that meaning or that wisdom that's coming from someone else and incorporate that into their own understanding of the world and therefore expand their sense making and their understanding and therefore options available to them to respond to the world more helpfully. None of that's going to happen when people don't trust each other's competence. 

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The absence of trust means that the team will struggle to hold together when the going gets tough as well, and the fault lines rapidly become chasms that become these huge gaps between team members psychologically. As they seek to look after themselves as individuals rather than work collectively. And they seek to minimize the risks associated with being tied to. You know, tied up to and exposed to the fortunes and fates of their teammates. 

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You know, it's one of the realities of working in a team is that when the team fails, you fail. Or if someone else in the team fails, you fail. And a lot of people struggle with that. They struggle with the idea that, you know, that someone else, this larger group, can be responsible ultimately for them, whether they succeed or whether they fail, they'd rather work on their own and therefore protect themselves from that probability rather than. Invest in supporting their teammates to succeed. Because collectively they'll be able to do so much more than they can individually. 

00:11:03:00 - 00:11:26:09>

And I like the way that Patrick Ani describes it as it's a kind of vulnerability based trust. The fact that I'm, you know, willing to come to you as my as a colleague and say, I need help, I need support, or I'm not sure I've got the answer here or I'm struggling with something. Because when you are a leader, the question is where do you go for that? Where do you go for that support, if not your peers? 

00:11:28:29 - 00:12:01:07>

It's not as if leaders have all the answers, and it's not as if leaders know exactly what they're doing and don't make mistakes and don't struggle with, you know, crisis of confidence or anxiety or worries or concerns. I mean, the number of senior leaders I've worked with, one on one who have that little voice in their shoulder, which says, do you really know what you're doing? You know, it tells me that all of us, regardless of our position. Need support, emotional support, psychological support, and even just intellectual support from other people so that we can make sense of things and find answers to it. 

00:12:02:12 - 00:12:37:22>

And that's where the real power of team comes from. So each of us can engage in the process of learning so that we can be even more effective. But if we can't do that with our colleagues in our team, who do we do that with? This is partly what was uncovered by Google's work around Project Aristotle. Project Aristotle was Google's attempt to try and discern what are the what are the key things that make the difference between a high performing team and a not so high performing team. So they they thought to themselves, well, we've got hundreds, if not thousands of projects that happen every year. 

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So, you know, it would be really great to understand what is the composition of a team that actually is more likely to be high performing. 

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So they had plenty of their own teams to study. They also had pretty good access to data, empirical data, research data, and they looked into it and what they found fascinating. Was not that the team should be made up of a composition of particular personality types or characteristics or tendencies or competencies. But the one thing that was really central to and present in the more successful teams, the higher performing teams was what they called psychological safety. And that is that every individual in the team felt psychologically safe, that they could bring themselves to that team and then they could declare what they really felt and what they really thought and what was on their mind. 

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Without fear of retribution or judgment from the rest of the team. And that's where real diversity of thought. That's where real diversity of of perspective can actually allow a team to produce something new. And also means that when the team members feel like that, that is a place where they can go and receive that kind of that generous support. That they're more likely to come asking for help. They're more likely to come and declare where they're struggling, and then the rest of the team can step in and support them and help them to to to to move somewhere else and be successful. 

00:13:59:19 - 00:14:06:19>

So this whole idea about it all starts with trust. Rule number eight. It could possibly be rule number one, because if it's important. 

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It's such an important rule. 

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Rule number nine. 

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Add a bit of hate. I've already touched upon this in my previous description about the importance of trust to allow teams to have fierce debate. Now, I've had a number of clients tell me about their previously unsuccessful attempts to make progress with unhelpful team dynamics. You know, and often the story entails the engagement of a team coach who ultimately conspired to preserve the existing dynamics because they were unwilling to challenge the team leader or particularly powerful members of the team. Now I go to great pains to help my clients understand that my role is not to tell them how wonderful they are, even though in many ways they are. 

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And I will let them know where they are. Wonderfully functional or or, you know, they're doing things that they need to conserve and protect and honor. I mean, the reality is most leaders already have enough people around them telling them how wonderful they are, or at least not telling them what they could be doing differently. My role, therefore, is at times to draw attention to their part of the mess. So if something's happening within the team and they're making a contribution to it and that is then ultimately producing the sorts of less than satisfactory results the team want to change. 

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My job is to bring their attention to that. Now that often means that I'm letting someone know what they're doing or what they're not doing, which is actually hindering the team. And this might be something that hasn't been shared with them before by somebody else. And I can tell you that there are many times where I do that, where I feel that nod of. 

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Anxiety in my stomach. I know that my body is reacting because it's getting ready for a strong reaction from that person. But nonetheless, I push through that and I share that observation with them because I believe that it will be helpful to them that if I don't challenge the status quo, particularly with the leader of the group, then no one will. And if I don't bring their attention to the status quo and help them see how it is unhelpful. Then nothing will change. 

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And as a good friend of mine likes to say, if nothing changes, nothing changes. 

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I have to be conscious, though, that in exercising that adding a bit of heat, you know, turning up the temperature a bit on on people. There is a risk, though, that the team can end up abdicating responsibility or accountability to me for being the one who turns up the heat. They become dependent on me for exercising that leadership. So my job is to encourage them to turn up the heat, encourage them to regulate the heat up and down where it's appropriate to allow something more transformative to happen. 

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And if you'd like to read a bit more about this idea of regulating heat, have a look. In my book, Extraordinary The Art and Science of Remarkable Leadership. Because you will find in there a chapter which is dedicated to this idea and some ideas and some techniques about how you can turn up the heat and turn the heat down so that you produce something transformative in in dynamics when you're leading, whether individuals or groups. 

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And now we've got rule number ten. Cultivate the exercise of leadership within. You know, I find that many teams or many team issues arise and fester because the members of the team are not exercising leadership within the team. They're actually leaving it all to the team leader and that's what we call hub and spoke where if you can just imagine that the team leader sits in the middle and that there's kind of this line of communication and accountability and performance management and coaching and feedback that goes out to the team members who are kind of arrayed around that person. And then that line of accountability and communication, etcetera, comes back into the team leader. 

00:17:58:19 - 00:18:31:02>

So the team leader has a relationship with each of the team members. But they don't have a relationship with each other. It's all left to the team leader to kind of manage issues and resolve problems and deal with conflict. And that clearly is not an effective way of doing things because the capacity of the team to solve problems, to deal with issues and to evolve is going to be enormously dependent upon the capacity of the team leader. So pretty quickly the team leader becomes the constraint. It will become the constraint on the teams ability to communicate and to resolve issues. 

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Conflicts. ET cetera. 

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Most most senior leadership teams, particularly, they'll accept, without question, their responsibility to provide leadership down into the organization. But I've noticed that they are often less willing to accept the hard work of exercising that same leadership courageously and responsibly into their peer group. You know, if team members can't have difficult conversations, if they can't have those tough but essential conversations where, for example, they can give each other feedback on on what they're doing, which is helping the team and what they're doing, which is not helping the team. 

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Then it all lifted the tame later. And I can't possibly not in today's world, not with the kind of constraints and the speed with which we need to work right now that can't possibly be helpful. So tough, but essential conversations need to be had. You know, artificial harmony needs to be avoided and otherwise issues fester and then that causes mistrust and suspicion. 

00:19:37:11 - 00:20:09:01>

It's not easy for teams to engage in that. But once they break through and they do it, once they normally find that it's not as bad as what they think it's going to be. So most people are, you know, often cautious about providing difficult feedback to other people because they're worried it's going to go nuclear, that the other person is going to to respond to them in a way which is going to be so painful. And difficult that it you know, they want to avoid even contemplating the idea. So their brain is often presenting this picture of a of this awful future. And so people pull back, they hold back. 

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They don't share that information that the other person needs to be successful. 

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I've got a. 

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Etched in my memory the memory of working with an executive team, a very, you know, quite large, multibillion dollar Australian retailer, and the top team there had had never given each other feedback. And as a consequence they've sort of behaviour sort of varied between quite aggressive, dictatorial through to, you know, you know, smoothing and smoothing, you know, false harmony. And if that were going to break through and actually solve some of the big problems that they needed to, if their teams and their stores would be successful, they needed to have these honest conversations. 

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So I, I asked them to engage in a round robin and feedback to each other. And at first you could just see it in their eyes. They this is not something they'd ever done before. They could probably have never imagined themselves doing it, but to their credit, they trusted me and engaged in the process. And I of course managed the process carefully to make sure that the the process was productive, that no one was going to get damaged in the process, that the kind of heat that was produced was going to be transformative and helpful and that the feedback was going to be balanced and specific and and relevant. 

00:21:21:10 - 00:21:42:19>

And they engage in that process. And afterwards they were so thankful for the opportunity. The CEO of this group continues to this day to talk about that moment and talk about what difference it actually made and how he could never have imagined them doing that previously. But now on the other side of it, just how important it was to their to the improvement of the team functioning. 

00:21:44:14 - 00:22:05:12>

You know, when when leadership is eventually cultivated within the team. But through things like candid conversations or courageous feedback. I'm often surprised by how quickly the team makes progress, not only with its own challenges, but also with the entrenched and systemic organizational challenges that they've previously been struggling with. 

00:22:08:29 - 00:22:42:13>

Rule number 11. Act before the whispers become screams. You know, teams don't need to be air quotes here. Broken teams don't need to be broken to deserve attention. New teams especially at risk of heading off on the team journey with the seeds of dysfunction, particularly potentially already sown. You know, human groups by their very nature, going to be dysfunctional and you will see unhelpful patterns of behavior quickly emerging and potentially taking root. And they're harder to weed out the longer they're allowed to thrive. 

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You know, I love this phrase that I heard recently. I was on a call with the leader of an Australian business who was heading up a the US operations and and he was telling me about this mentor that he had who had said to him that, you know, things that aren't going well never get better if you fail to pay attention to them, they always get worse. And I think that is very true. Of. Team dynamics. They never get better. 

00:23:15:12 - 00:23:45:06>

Just by allowing them time. So I am very encouraging of new teams who wish to establish that starting foundation of clarity and alignment commitment that early on they do the work and they build those patterns and they build those those norms and those rituals and those routines that allow them to operate at that sort of higher level of performance as a team so that any early whispers of discontent don't have the chance to later on become screams. 

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And then the final rule. Rule number 12. Pay disciplined attention to support the change. You know, I. I believe that the science of behavior change is conclusive. You know, to cultivate new behaviors and habits in a disciplined and diligent way. You know, attention has to be paid by the team, setting specific goals, you know, setting specific goals about things they're going to do, which is different. And then they need to create triggers to constantly remind them of those commitments. 

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They need to measure their progress, constantly be stopping and asking themselves what kind of progress we're making, what measures are we using? How do we know we're getting better at this? And and they need to create rewards and consequences for when they behave consistently with the teams commitments or the norms and also consequences when. They behave in a way which is contrary to the team's commitments or their norms. 

00:24:46:12 - 00:25:29:14>

I mentioned in the last episode where I took you through rules 1 to 6 of the 12 rules for coaching leadership teams. I shared with you a bit about the story of Basketball Australia and the National Basketball League, how the the board and the management of Basketball Australia and that of the National Basketball League needed to come together and find a way of working together. So I didn't share the complete story there. The first time I worked with them was very powerful. It was a one-day  workshop and I talked about how finding common purpose, you know, engaging in sort of vulnerability based trust and having frank and candid conversations about things was quite transformative in their relationship. 

00:25:29:14 - 00:26:01:12>

And everyone worked at walked away from that day saying this feels so much better. And I remember having very clear conversation with a couple of senior leaders in that group and saying, So is this it, though? Is you know, how are you going to make sure you stay on target? How are you going to make sure that you you bring this to life consistently over time? And they said, no, it'll be fine. You know, we'll be fine. I think this has been transformative and we're just going to be fine. You know, we'll just make sure we do that. And I was a little bit dubious about that. But these are experienced senior leaders. 

00:26:01:28 - 00:26:05:29>

And so said, good luck to you. I hope I hope that is, in fact, the case. 

00:26:07:14 - 00:26:39:09>

18 months later. I was contacted by both organizations again saying, you know, that work that we did that was really helpful, but we've kind of reverted back. We've gone backwards. You know, we're kind of back where we were. And so I said, great. Really happy that you reached out. Very, very happy to support you. But you do understand that what we're going to need to do is set up a really disciplined pattern of of working on this. It's not just going to be one event. We're going to do a series of things. We're going to do them over time on a regular basis. 

00:26:39:09 - 00:27:09:09>

And I'm going to ask you to work on this stuff and work hard at it so you can build the right habits. And to their credit, they did. And so over a period of time, we worked on it and got together regularly as they had their conversations, their coordination and collaboration conversations to kind of harmonize the way that the NBL and Basketball Australia worked together on on basketball. We also did the work around coaching and and developing the way in which they were interacting. 

00:27:10:05 - 00:27:33:29>

And as the chair of that group, I was constantly making observations and providing feedback and encouraging, you know, the great progress that they were making, as well as drawing their attention to areas where they might have been struggling. So those regular check ins and interventions, you know, paying, disciplined attention to doing the work over time is usually required until those more productive patterns become habits. 

00:27:35:15 - 00:27:56:17>

And I'd suggest to you that it can take anywhere up to 12 to 18 months for those productive patterns to really become strong habits, strong enough habits that they're just going to keep on going without any kind of, you know, need to necessarily review them on a regular basis. So that's rule number 12. Pay discipline and  Attention to support the change. 

00:28:00:10 - 00:28:30:21>

Well, that's almost it for this episode of the Xtraordinary Leaders podcast. I hope that you got something from it and that in some way it's helped expand your thinking about leadership or how leadership teams can grow and succeed together. If you have any questions or comments about this episode or the content in it, feel free to reach out to me at Gerard at Extraordinary Leaders. So that's extraordinary without any. Alternately, you can make contact via our website and find more resources, including a series of blogs on any number of topics, including some around teams. 

00:28:31:27 - 00:29:11:22>

You'll find that at xtraordinaryleaders.com. There's also quite a significant back catalogue now of our podcasts where we cover a whole range of different topics around leadership, which you can find at the Extraordinary Leader's website. There's a section in there which hosts all of our podcasts or on any of the platforms that you might normally listen to podcasts including Apple and Spotify as well as Google Play, Ally, and any number of podcast platforms. In fact, if you'd like to subscribe, you can make sure that you can not only listen to all the back catalogue, but also be notified whenever there's a new episode which is launched and there will be some good ones coming up. 

00:29:11:22 - 00:29:36:09>

I've in the background been talking to some very interesting people about, I think what are quite important leadership topics in the current context and world in which we live. And I'm looking forward to bringing those episodes to you in the coming weeks and months. But in the meantime, as you engage in the work of leadership in your life and in your world, I wish you all the very best. Take care. Lead well.