In meeting after meeting during the last six to nine months, I have heard the same phrase used over and over, namely “We need the right people in the right seats”, referencing the concept from Jim Collin’s book, Good to Great. In reality, we need the right people in the right seats, the right teams with the right focus, and everyone using the right tools connected to the right outcomes.
This morning, let’s talk about right people and right teams. First, people need individual competencies to be successful at a team level. Individual competencies refer to a person’s knowledge and skills required to fulfill specific role requirements. Second, teams need team competencies which are the collective abilities of the team required to execute the business strategy. For example, being competent at working through conflict as a team is a basic and yet so few teams have discussed this or been trained on how to do this.
When we get so busy focusing on solving operational issues, we forget that having the right people in the right seats and having the right teams with the right focus will create a healthy living system. As Margaret Wheatley wrote: “A healthy living system is a good learner and can thrive even though its environment is moving toward increasing disorder. But to do so it must be actively engaged and aware.” Many leaders are not ready for this level of work because it means they will loose control of the people and/or the solution to certain problems.
Therefore, I believe we need to build more professional learning communities, a term I learned from working with educators, where in-depth sharing and practice takes place. I have seen these communities work together at our From Vision to Action Executive Roundtables. As they sit around the table, they are building common knowledge, common language, and common perspective. They also are building and maintaining important relationships, sharing what is and what is not working which is in part a micro strategic and operational review, and building a foundation for handling beginnings and endings . One interesting element of these professional learning communities is that they become a way to build culture and institutionalize an organization’s culture.
Next, I believe we need senior teams to be true teams rather than simply single leader work groups. The two defining characteristics of excellent senior teams are that they can hold in-depth strategic debate and dialogue, and at the same time have respect for the other members of the team, especially their skills, their talents and their strengths. In order to build this depth of good strategic debate, dialogue and respect for others on the team, senior leaders need to do the following:
- Clarify identity. This process involves defining the core principles about how to deliver high quality, day to day service and how to move forward through difficult times. A clear sense of identity mobilizes people into purposeful action. It also helps build networks of relationship, which ultimately builds community
- Build community. What many leaders forget is that effective teams are born from healthy community. When the overall sense of community is grounded in clear ethics and core principles, we have social coherence and community resilience.
This week, sit down with your team and talk about identity and ethics. Discuss and clarify with them who we are, what we believe in, and how we work through the challenges that are happening around us. We as leaders must be and create an “island of sanity”, a new term by Margaret Wheatley, in an ocean of challenge and difficult choices.
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