Is Your Team Enough To Win Big?

Your team isn't enough.

Not because they lack talent, but because today's biggest leadership challenges require influence far beyond your direct reports.

In this inaugural episode of LeadershipSOPs, Ed Tyson explores why great leaders must build a "Community of Effort" across teams, departments, and stakeholders to create real results. Learn how to move beyond silos, navigate complex organizational dynamics, and lead with greater clarity, influence, and impact.

Because leadership isn't about managing what's under your control. It's about creating alignment where none exists.

Enjoyed this episode? Be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who could benefit from the conversation.

For more leadership insights, resources, and ways to connect with Ed Tyson, visit:

Website: https://askedtyson.com

Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next episode.

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:01

If you're leading a team that feels stuck in chaos, conflict, or constant pressure, then this podcast is for you. Leadership SOPs gives you the framework to create clarity, drive results, and lead with consistency. So here's your host, Ed Tyson.

Speaker 0:22

Your team is not enough. Not because they can't get there, but because the only path forward is through the muck and mire of complex, cross-functional collaboration. Do you remember the first time you had that realization? The suffocating recognition that there was just no easy path to victory? And it boomerangs too, doesn't it? Even once you've moved on and honored the fact that it will take your team plus a couple other teams to get there, that feeling creeps back up. Particularly when you're tired or after a dicey skirmish or two with a particularly difficult colleague, and definitely when the vision is so clear and the strategy, you know it's sound, you know it's gonna work. But the coalition, the alignment that's needed, that's another story. It's a fight or flight moment. Because to win, you will have to fight for the organization's attention, fight for your strategy, fight for the resources, fight over processing capability gaps you don't control. And the list goes on. You know that if you don't fight this battle, you'll lose. And yet, if you do fight it, if you turn it into a fight, if you treat it like a battle, everyone loses. You know your colleagues are not combatants, but do they know that? Leadership is hard, but this beast called enterprise leadership is a whole different animal. An animal we are going to explore together here on the Leadership SOPs podcast. Hello, I'm Ed Tyson, leadership author, coach, and consultant, and creator of the Leadership SOP's Methodology, Framework, and app. At just 17 years old, the fine men and women of the United States Marine Corps kicked off my 30-plus year fascination with leadership and work. A journey which included studying philosophy and organizational behavior, and working at or with government, private, not-for-profit, and publicly traded organizations spanning healthcare, big tech, biotech, fintech, and more. I'm not saying I've seen it all, but I am saying I've seen enough. Enough to spot the fractals, the repeating patterns which recur no matter the sector, product, or service. Because at the end of the day, it is our humanity that drives the all-too familiar calamity we often see at scale. In this, our inaugural episode, we are going to dig around at the roots of enterprise leadership and transform those fight or flight feelings into fortitude, giving you the language and the logic to reframe enterprise leadership for yourself and more importantly, for others. Now, I want to warn you right up front, we're gonna get a little heady at times, but only to simplify and demystify what others have made too complicated, or to help us unwind a wrong-minded approach that just isn't bearing fruit in the real world. When I left the comfort of a job almost 15 years ago, I hung a virtual sign on my office door which said, I could do a lot of things, from strategy to structure to people and process improvement. And indeed, I could do all that. However, the thing I loved most made me the least amount of money, required the most marketing, and truth be told, I wasn't that good at it. Not really. I loved executive coaching, but my love for it, much like my love for singing, didn't make me any good at it. I was applying all of the usual tricks of the trade and falling prey to all of the usual results. Insights galore, some real change, but very few lasting transformations. Sound familiar? As a leader of leaders, our mission, yours and mine, are very similar, and the data would suggest that we're both failing. Leadership development investments are projected to top 366 billion this year, and yet CEOs and CHROs globally are convinced their leaders aren't actually leading. They are in role, but not engaging in the process itself. Remarkably, survey after survey shows the leaders themselves essentially agree. They report feeling ill-equipped and unsupported. And rank and file employees are not only dissatisfied with all of us all the way to the top, they are also refusing to join our ranks. Regardless of pay and perks. They've had it, and so have we, if we don't change. And that is why I'm here, despite all the noise on this subject. And I suspect it's why you're here too. Because the so-called gurus aren't helping us with the real problems, with the real process of leading. Ten years ago, I could see this problem coming, because it was already manifesting everywhere. And I could see I wasn't delivering the value. I wasn't having the right conversations or making the right impact. And from that deep self-reflection came something more potent and much more practical. Now I know you can't make it to every talk, and you certainly can't listen in on every confidential coaching session, but you can be right here, right now. And so can I. And I promise if you make that commitment, I'll make good use of our time. And together, we will structure, operate, and perfect the communities of effort you need to succeed. As we start this journey together, I'd like you to consider an important question. Why do you lead? Let me clarify. I don't mean that in some existential sense, like why do you get up in the morning or what drove you to become a leader in the first place? I mean why does anyone lead? What is leading for? Why is it a thing? This is a critical question, because without understanding its answer, we can neither know leadership nor how to improve it. For it really is in the purpose of a tool and understanding the value it must deliver that we come to know it and indeed how to wield it. I think it was Aristotle who famously noted that man is by nature a social animal, highlighting the fact that as individuals, we are nearly inseparable from the communities within which we exist. We rely on them for the retention and transfer of knowledge, for critical resources, for protection, even for mates. Our social systems are more than security blankets. They are our most unique and powerful resource for goal attainment, causing our ambitions to frequently extend past what we could realistically hope to achieve without them. In other words, we lead because we are not just social, we are also ambitious creatures, and our ambitions drive us to embrace objectives we could never achieve alone. Unfortunately, many interpret this primary condition to mean that the purpose of leading is to achieve these social ambitions, making leadership a means to an end, positioning it as a social process and individual deploys for collective achievement. The problem here is that this fixes the leader's eyes on the achievement, on the ends, when I think leadership is really about the means. So it's not falling down that slippery slope which allows for the ends to justify the means, right? So alternatively, I would suggest that leadership is primarily about those means. It is in fact a process of social organization meant to cultivate the means, the community of effort, which we do not yet possess. So while the objective might send us on the path, the leadership, we pull that out of our pocket in order to create the capacity to pursue the goal. Now, of course, the ends are not irrelevant. You'll get a gold star if you achieve your objectives, but so will the team. Achieving the objective is one of a number of factors that determines whether you led well, perhaps, but not if you led. And this is absolutely critical. If you and I are trying to get more leaders leading and therefore on the path to doing it well. Now I've used the phrase community of effort repeatedly throughout this episode, and now I've linked it to the very purpose of leading without pausing to explain myself, and I think it's about time I go there, because it is at the crux of untangling and reframing the challenge of enterprise leadership. If we simply said the word team, if we said that developing a team, for instance, was the purpose of leading, we would fail to convey the true nature of the challenge. Because we would inevitably focus too narrowly on just our team, the people that report to us. But this is never really enough, is it? Your challenge as a leader is always bigger than just your team. Even your leaders who aren't dancing with enterprise leadership. But community of effort, on the other hand, implies more. It implies interdependence. I use the term community of effort precisely because beyond your team lies stakeholders who must either cooperate or at the very least refrain from blocking your teams. This reality is almost always the case, and it is almost always the case that we fail to fully recognize this until it is painfully obvious and too late. And that is where we have been headed this whole time. That is how clarifying what leadership is, what it is for, can help us untangle it in its most complicated forms. I started here because the journey starts here. We have to have our heads on straight. Most leaders anchor their leadership, their scope, the boundaries of their leadership with their team. And at best, they think the purpose of their leadership is to cultivate the team they manage. At worst, they focus on just achievement. As a result, they are frustrated by the broader machinations that distract from that mission. They become resentful, if not threatened by overlaps of the interdependence, the reliance on other leaders and teams for their success. And rather than attend to it, they let the critical issues fester. They fortify their boundaries, dealing with what they can control and solve more directly. And ultimately, their teams suffer and their organizations suffer. And I guarantee that your challenge also has its root here. Because even if you've embraced this sense long ago, you willingly accepted your charge to be more, to lead more broadly, your job is still undoubtedly complicated by the fact that most of your peers and the leaders you lead haven't. Not yet. They need your help. They need your leadership. The number one challenge of succeeding with enterprise leadership is accepting it as core, core to your mission, and helping others do the same. Otherwise, you will be fighting a cold war with their resentment or your own. Now, with the table properly set and our journey begun, we can go beyond the why to the what, the work of leading. Next on the Leadership SOP. If today's discussion resonated, subscribe and share, or better yet, leave a review. And if you have questions or suggestions, visit at askedtyson.com or find, follow, and message me on LinkedIn. And of course, lead on.

Speaker 1 14:14

So that's it for today's episode of Leadership SOPs. Head on over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen and subscribe to the show. One lucky listener every single week that posts a review on Apple Podcasts will win a chance the grand prize drawing to win a $25,000 value VIP Day with Ed Tyson himself. Be sure to head on over to leadershipsopspodcast.com and pick up a free copy of that gift and join us next time.