Your #1 Team Isn't the One You Manage

What if the most important team you belong to isn't the one you lead?

In this Mike on the Mic episode, I share one of the most important leadership lessons I've learned in nearly four decades of coaching executive teams. Using Alan Mulally's remarkable turnaround of Ford as the backdrop, I explain why organizations struggle when leaders prioritize their own departments over the leadership team.

I'll walk through how silos develop, why "disagree and commit" is essential for executive alignment, and the five practical moves that help leadership teams become true strategic partners instead of simply reporting updates around the table.

If you want your organization to break through growth barriers, it starts with strengthening the team at the top.

Key Takeaways

• Why your first team should be the leadership team—not the department you manage.
• The leadership lesson behind Ford's dramatic turnaround under Alan Mulally.
• How silos quietly limit organizational growth.
• What "disagree and commit" really means.
• Five practical ways to build a stronger leadership team.
• A simple question that reveals whether your executives are truly operating as one team.

Website: https://www.mike-goldman.com

Breakthrough Leadership Team Assessment: https://www.mike-goldman.com/bltassessment

Thanks for listening! Connect with us at mike-goldman.com/blog and on Instagram@mikegoldmancoach and on YouTube @Mikegoldmancoach

Transcript

Mike 0:02

If your weekly leadership team meeting is a status meeting, a round-robin of department status updates, and shoot me if I need to sit through another status meeting. But if it's, all about department status updates, you're reinforcing silos. Spend your real time on the biggest issues, the biggest opportunities, the biggest priorities that are cross-functional. Have that who could help, how can we help kinds of conversations. Fix the meeting, and you start to fix the team.

Mike Goldman 0:45

You made it to the better leadership team show, the place where you learn how to surround yourself with the right people, doing the right things. So you can grow your business without losing your mind. I'm your host and leadership team coach, Mike Goldman. I'm going to show you how to improve top and bottom line growth, fulfillment, and the value your company adds to the world by building a better leadership team. All right, let's go.

Ford In Crisis

Mike 1:17

Picture a conference room at Ford Motor Company. It's late 2006, and the company's on its way to losing $16.3 billion, 16.3 billion just that year. There's a new CEO in the building. His name is Alan Mulally, and he just came over from Boeing. He started running a weekly meeting he called the BPR, the Business Plan Review. And in that meeting, every one of his top leaders goes through all of their key projects and shows up on a slide whether they are in the green, succeeding, in the red, failing, or yellow, in danger, somewhere in the middle.

All Green Slides

Mike 2:00

And in the first few meetings Alan looks up at the screen and every single slide is green. Every one. At a company on its way to losing billions of dollars, every slide, every project is in the green. Now, obviously that makes no sense. That math doesn't work. If everyone is successful, the company can't be losing $16.3 billion. So not only does the math not work, but obviously it's pissing off Alan Mulally, who's not gonna be able to get anything done if people, his leaders, aren't honest. Now, let's talk a little bit about why they were all green.

Culture Of Fear

Mike 2:48

Well, before Alan was hired, a gentleman named Bill Ford Jr. was both chairman and CEO of the company. Bill was the great-grandson of Henry Ford, and he was in danger of forever being known as the guy that lost Ford. That's how bad things were. So he goes out and hires Alan as his CEO, and Bill keeps the chairman slot. Now, the bad news was he had to do this because he wasn't a very good CEO. He wasn't very good at running the day-to-day business. The good news was he was self-aware enough to know it and hire Alan, and the reason why, getting back to why no one was being honest, one of Bill Ford Jr.'s biggest problems was he created a very cutthroat, competitive environment where if you admitted a problem, you got punished for it. So every leader learned to protect themselves, protect their own division, keep their slide green, and let the other guy go red first, not me. Until one day.

Mark Fields Goes Red

Mike 4:00

One day, a gentleman named Mark Fields, who is the president of Ford Americas, decides he's gonna be honest. Now, why does he decide to be honest? Well, before Alan was hired as CEO, Mark believed, and everyone knew he believed he was heir apparent to the CEO slot. Well, he's thinking at the time, "Alan knows I was after his job. He's not gonna want me around very long, so why not just be honest? What could I lose?" So on that week, Alan's going around the room, green, green, green, green, gets to Mark Fields and Mark Fields says, "And on the Ford Edge project, we're in the red." There's now silence in the room because everybody's waiting for Mark to get his head chopped off. That's what would've happened in the Bill Ford Jr. regime. But from the front of the room, there's clapping.

From Leaders To Team

Mike 5:04

Alan says, "Mark, thank you for your honesty. Let's all figure out how to help Mark." And it was in that moment, that, that simple but critical moment, that they changed from a group of leaders sitting around the table to a leadership team. From that day on, everything wasn't green. There was a rainbow in that meeting of reds, yellows, greens. They now had the ability to be honest with each other and get real work done. And that's a big reason why, if you remember back in 2008, 2009, after the Great Recession, every domestic car company except one needed a bailout from the government, all except Ford. And there's a lot that happened to turn Ford around, but it all started with that lead domino of Alan come in and building the team. GM and Chrysler went bankrupt. Ford drove right through it. Pun intended, I guess.

Your First Team

Mike 6:17

Now, I don't tell you that story because it's about honesty, although it is. I tell you because of what it says about teams. Because at the old Ford, every one of those leaders believed their number one team was the division they ran. Protect my turf, hit my numbers, keep my slide green, and that belief nearly sank the company. What Mulally did with a color-coded chart and the words, "Who could help Mark?" was change the answer to one simple question: What's your number one team? So here's what I wanna make the case for today. Your number one team is not the team you manage. And I wanna say that again because for some of you, that's not gonna land quite right. Your number one team is not the team you manage. It's the team you're on. And if you're on that senior leadership team, your number one team is the senior leadership team. The biggest thing I've learned from my almost 40 years in, coaching and consulting, and crap, I can't believe I'm that old. But the biggest thing I've learned is as the leadership team goes, so goes the organization. And if the team at the top is really just a bunch of division heads or department heads defending their turf, that's exactly what cascades down to everyone else. Patrick Lencioni calls this your first team. And this might be the single most important mindset shift that a senior leader can make. Now, almost no leader would ever say out loud, "My department matters more than the company," but you need to watch what they do. Of course, actions speak a whole lot louder than words.

Spot Silo Behavior

Mike 8:27

And let me ask you a few questions about your own team. When there's a company-wide problem, one that doesn't sit neatly inside anybody's department, do your leaders lean in or do they get quiet because it's not my area? When one function is drowning, does anybody else jump in to help without being asked? Or does everybody stay in their lane and think, "Thank God it's not my problem"? And when the budget gets tight, does each leader fight for their own headcount or for what the company needs most? These answers tell you whether you have a real leadership team or just a group of department heads who happen to share a conference room and report up to the CEO. Here's the simplest test I know. Go around your leadership team one at a time and ask each person, "Tell me about your team," and then listen. Because the head of finance is probably gonna talk about the finance team. The head of sales is probably gonna talk about the sales team. And almost no one is gonna describe the peers of the team they're on of the leadership team.

Two Teams Per Leader

Mike 9:54

So let me give you a way to hold this in your head. Every leader on your team is really on two teams. If you're a leader on the leadership team, you are the captain of the team below you, the department you run, and you're a player on the team beside you, the leadership team. Most leaders pour 90% of their loyalty into the team they captain. Great leaders and great leadership teams flip that, and they play for the team beside them first. Here's what that looks like in practice. The head of sales willingly subordinates the sales team's goals when operations is the biggest company problem or priority this quarter. Service jumps in to help sales when top line is a problem. Nobody's losing, and the company is winning. That's the how can we help, who can we help mentality from Alan's BPR meeting, and we need that every single week.

Disagree And Commit

Mike 11:08

And here's something important, and it's the concept of disagree and commit, and the leadership team being the number one team is what allows it to happen. Let me describe it. Disagree and commit says we absolutely will disagree on a leadership team. A real leadership team, a strong leadership team is gonna battle a bit. You might fight for option A instead of option B, but once everyone is heard, a decision is made, and it may or may not be the decision that you wanted or your team wanted. And here's what disagree and commit does not look like. You believed it was option A. You go back to your team after the meeting where the leadership team decided to go with option B. Your team says, "What happened? Please tell us you decided on option A." And you say, "No, sorry, everybody, they decided option B. Let's make the best of it." Now, on its surface, that doesn't sound so bad. You're not telling the team not to execute on option B, but here are the two problems with what I just said. One is I said they decided it's option B. That separates you from the rest of the leadership team. No, no, no, they didn't decide. We as a leadership team decided. We as a leadership team had a great discussion, and at the end of that discussion, folks, we decided option B was the best option. So it's not they decided, it's we decided. Second thing is saying, "Let's make the best of it," which again, on its surface doesn't sound so horrible. I've probably done that in the past. But let's be honest, saying let's make the best of it is kind of code for saying let's prove to these folks, let's prove to these SOBs that they made the wrong decision. Let's look for every excuse. While we're trying to do the right thing, let's look for every excuse to prove we were right in the first place. So if your leadership team is the number one team, what that means is you go back to your team and say, "We had a great discussion. We decided to go with option B. Let's figure out how to make this work." That's disagree and commit, and that's only possible if you put the leadership team, your loyalty to the leadership team above your own team. Again, loyalty needs to go to the team you're on first, not the team you captain.

Five Moves To Build

Mike 14:01

So how do you actually build a team whose first team is the leadership team? I think you do that in five moves. Let me talk about them at a high level, and then I'm gonna dig in a little bit. So one is make it explicit. Two is give them shared goals. Three is change your meeting. Four is reward the right behavior, and five is you go first. So let's expand that a bit.

Make It Explicit

Mike 14:30

So first, make it explicit. That means name it out loud. Tell your team in plain language, "Your first team is this team." Don't leave it as an unspoken hope. Most leaders have never once been told the leadership team comes first, so be explicit about it.

Shared Goals Win

Mike 14:55

Move number two, shared goals. Align the team around a small number of company-level priorities for the year, for the quarter. And while each one needs individual accountability, I talk about that a lot, the whole leadership team is responsible for the success of all those goals. When one leader is falling down in their ability to successfully accomplish one of those goals and one of those priorities, the whole leadership team needs to jump in and help. When people can only win together, they start acting like a team.

Fix The Meeting

Mike 15:38

Move number three, change your meeting. If your weekly leadership team meeting is a status meeting, a round-robin of department status updates, and shoot me if I need to sit through another status meeting. But if it's, all about department status updates, you're reinforcing silos. Spend your real time on the biggest issues, the biggest opportunities, the biggest priorities that are cross-functional. Have that who could help, how can we help kinds of conversations. Fix the meeting, and you start to fix the team.

Reward And Model

Mike 16:18

Fourth move, reward the right behavior. Catch the leader who sacrificed their own department's win for the company's. Celebrate it out loud. That's the behavior that cascades. What you celebrate, what you highlight, you're gonna get more of. Five, you go first. If you're on the leadership team, this is about Mark Fields going first and saying, "On the Ford Edge project, we're in the red." So if you're listening to this and you're on the leadership team, you go first. You put the leadership team first. You be more honest. Now, if you are the leader of leaders and you're listening to this, you're the CEO, then make sure you are not protecting your favorites. Make sure you're not letting turf defending slide. Don't punish the person that brings you a red project status. When you do that, you've taught everybody the real rules, no matter what you say. The team's first team behavior will never rise above your own.

Hidden Drag On Growth

Mike 17:37

So let me be blunt with you. A group of talented department heads who aren't actually a team is not a leadership team. It's just a group of leaders that happen to report to the CEO. Strategy and accountability meetings become status meetings, and I've never once sat through a status meeting that broke through a growth ceiling or came up with an original idea. And here's what makes this so dangerous. It's invisible. There's no line on a dashboard or on a P&L that says the leadership team is quietly protecting their own silos. But it's one of the biggest hidden drags on growth that I see in company after company. Smart people working hard, each one winning their own game, but the company loses and the company stalls. So today we talked about why your number one team is not the team you manage, what silos cost you, how to wrap your head around that and five moves to change that. Just ask Ford what first team really means and how it impacted them.

Challenge And Assessment

Mike 19:01

So here's your challenge this week. Ask each of your leaders that one question. Tell me about your team, and really listen to the answer. Because until they start with the leadership team, you don't have a leadership team yet. You just have a group of leaders reporting into the CEO. Now, one of the best ways to assess whether you really have a leadership team or just a group of leaders is to actually take a free assessment that I have called the Breakthrough Leadership Team Assessment. So if you're interested, and I hope you are, you can just go to my website, mike-goldman.com/bltassessment. And remember, if you want a great company, you need a great leadership team. Look forward to seeing you soon.