Transcript of Tapping Into Your Team’s Hidden Reserve

Thank you for joining this edition of our Great Leadership Teams Webinar Series. Today's topic is a pretty cool one that hopefully you'll be able to take a few insights away from, and I'm sure many of you will have some experience in dealing with the challenge. It's called Tapping Into Your Team's Hidden Reserve.

My name is Jack McGuinness, and I'm the managing partner at Relationship Impact, a consulting firm exclusively devoted to working with leadership teams of growing companies to help them get in shape both structurally and relationally.

Today's topic, why is it that sometimes we have these teams that are able to focus and solve problems and come together in a crisis, but day to day they're just very dysfunctional? Our premise is that if you're able to tap into the hidden reserve that helps you in a crisis, you'll be able to operate day to day more effectively, which puts a little bit less stress on the organization, because our premise is that working in a crisis is not sustainable. Let's get started. Oops, sorry about that.

All right. One of our clients refers to crisis teams that are good at managing enterprises as brute force leadership teams. The quote is that, "We just rise to the challenge, just rally around a common goal and use our collective talents and experience to make progress and to get the results we're looking for." But day to day they're out of sync. They let disagreements turn into stupidity. Unit silos are reinforced. Unhealthy coalitions. Gossip is formed. Individuals make commitments that they have no intention of keeping and on and on and on. So day to day they don't work well, but in a crisis they're able to ... Think about a new acquisition or implementing a new system or launching a new product, they're able to come together, embrace the challenge and just get laser focused on being as functional as they can to solve the challenge. They get focused on what's most important, figure out who needs to do what by when, and they get the resources necessary to make a make stuff happen.

The challenge is twofold. First it is not easy to work in crisis mode. Oftentimes you have to re-learn how to do good work together, re-learn how teammates actually operate, what they're good at and what their challenges are, and often commit intense time and effort to get the crisis solved. So it's just definitely physically and emotionally draining.

Secondly, complexity is an issue. As organizations scale, their crises, the types of challenges they're dealing with are more complex. There's more employees, there's more vendors involved, there's more customers impacted potentially and there's often more dollars at stake. And so while it's fine to operate in a crisis, it's hard to sustain, very hard to sustain.

The purpose of today's discussion is just to point out what can we learn from how we operate in a crisis and take those lessons and experiences to how we operate on a day to day basis. All the stuff I'm about to talk to you about is fairly easy to talk about, but not that easy to execute as many of you I'm sure can agree with.

Okay, I'll call this Tapping Into the Hidden Reserve.

There's two things that need to happen to tap into the hidden reserve. Set aside unproductive stuff that you're doing to get to the crisis to begin with. Stop avoiding the tough conversations that result in kicking the can down the road. Stop behaving as if time and use of resources come in unlimited quantities, because they don't. It's really draining, as I mentioned before, and can be potentially very costly from a service, from an employee engagement, from a customer impact perspective and a dollar perspective to continue to operate in crisis mode. So set aside some of the big unproductive characteristics.

Adopt some of the positive crisis management characteristics. Some of the stuff that great teams do when they're great at operating in crisis are they get laser focused on the goal. They have a common goal, they all agreed to it and they work towards it, and they're able to put personal junk aside and stay focused on what's most important. The scary part is that they don't do this day to day, but when they know they have to deal with this new acquisition that's coming up or get this product launched by a certain date, they're able to just say, "Ah, screw it. We're just going to come together and do my part and just let all this personal stuff go away." Also team members have to just learn to listen. In a crisis they naturally listen to each other more and have to compromise. The infighting and the petty stuff diminishes to get the issue resolved.

So really important to set aside the bad stuff that got you in the crisis to begin with and rally around some of the stuff that really contributes to you working well in a crisis. Let me repeat: Common goal, staying focused on what's most important and really being able to compromise with each other.

There's a couple things that need to happen to make any of that work well. In order to move from crisis mode or brute force leadership and draw from what works in a crisis, we have to repair the relational fibers that have been damaged along the way. We have to check the assumptions we have in each other that had been built up based on the behaviors we observe of each other, because these assumptions are often wrong. We have to step back as it relates to the assumptions, suspend judgment. If we have patience and say, "I'm going to give the benefit of the doubt to my teammates and see how it works," it helps to repair some trust.

Perhaps most importantly is starting with what do I need to do differently to help build the relational fibers with my teammates, rather than focused on what's so wrong with everyone else. Because when trust improves across a team, their ability to compromise and listen and to talk to each other in a direct and constructive way goes up dramatically. Again, I recognize and I'm sure, because I can see some of the people, I'm looking down the list of people who are on this call, I'm sure many of you echo my point of view that this not easy work. It's hard to build these fibers and sometimes stuff gets worse before it gets better.

The next piece: You have to strengthen the structural foundation. There's a couple of things, and again this is how do we learn from how we operate well in a crisis and make it happen day to day. Definitely focusing on the relational stuff is going to be important to enable us to put the right structural foundation in place. As leadership teams gain more comfort in challenging and disagree with each other, they can begin to build an effective structural base as it says here.

They have to engage in this sometimes difficult discussions about how to best integrate team member roles. This simply can't happen if there is a zero sum game mentality on a team. People have to get out of their own way and actually have to really dig in and figure out how to be a bit more curious with each other so that there can be a sense of compromise, because the integration of team member roles is a huge structural challenge that we see in many of the leadership teams they we work with.

I'll give you a couple of examples. There's a natural tension between, for example, product development and IT or operations. There are natural gray areas between these departments and these roles and if leadership team members don't figure out how to deal with those gray areas, then they get themselves in trouble. I'm sure you all get why it's really important to have a good relational foundation so that you can have the tough discussions necessary. Sometimes you have to do both at the same time, which becomes very difficult, but it does smoke out some of the issues around the relational tensions when we start talking about integration.

The CEO plays a really strong role when there is a strong dysfunction that holds team members back from compromise. They have to force the curiosity and compromise and hold people accountable to having some different behaviors than they have typically operated by, and that's sometimes a hard thing for CEOs.

Establishing the behavioral expectations for how they will operate together is huge. These can't be just words that are put on a piece of paper or put on a flip chart; they actually have to be modeled and lived by every person on the executive team. And most importantly, operational principles or norms are useless unless people aren't challenged to live by them. So if I fall down on one of these operational behavioral principles and I'm called out on it, I have to say, "I got you. I understand where you're coming from." Or have to be curious, "Tell me a little bit more about what you're talking about. Why you think I failed on that."

As in most of the discussions we have on building a great leadership team, really important to do some relational repair work so that you can have the tough conversations necessary to build the right structural foundation. And if you're able, if you're one of these teams that is just great at brute force leadership, reflecting back on how you operate in the crisis, how you operate and what makes you good in a crisis will help you identify what can make sense in a day to day operation, because as we said earlier, really important, there's no way that teams can maintain for very long operating in crisis mode, particularly as the organization scales and it gets more complex. It's very difficult to maintain this crisis management type of operational framework.

Our final thoughts on today's brief webinar. Acknowledge that brute force leadership is not sustainable and commit to digging into the lessons learned for what makes you great in a crisis so that you can bring it to the day to day operations that your team must stay operated on to be sustainable. From our perspective, focus on both sides of the great leadership team coin. Listen and compromise and ensure effective integration. Deal with the structural while you're dealing with the relational.

That's all we have for you for this week. I appreciate your participation on this month's webinar. Look forward to seeing you on the next one. If you have any questions, again please raise your hand using the chat function.

One more thought: Next webinar is on the 25th of March. It's called Loose Expectations Are Dangerous. Dealing with a couple of organizations right now, a couple of leadership teams where the CEOs have established some very loose expectations for how the team was set up to operate from compensation to perks to role depth and expectations, and those loose expectations are causing some serious downstream problems. So we're going to take some of the lessons from these clients I'm working with and bring them to light in next month's webinar.