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Building a Leadership Team - Part 3

Written by: Michael Schutzler

Article Overview: Talent is necessary for building a winning leadership team, but talent is not sufficient. You can recruit the very best in every functional area of responsibility in your organization, but unless they work well together, you will fail to create sustainable value. And in a competitive environment, you will lose to teams with far less talent if they work well together but you don’t. There is a tongue in cheek axiom that comes as a corollary to this – “I’d rather be lucky than good.” If you believe in blind luck, go with God and stop reading. If you believe we make our own luck, I’d like to share three principles for creating a great leadership team and some practical insights into each: agreement on the mission, clear communication, and balance. Part 3 = Balance

Building a Leadership Team - Part 3

Part III: Balance

A typical leadership team has between 5 and 10 members. Too few, and the power is too weak. Too many and discussion becomes unwieldy. Because the challenges faced by even small organizations today are technically complex and often global, the best leadership teams include a rich diversity of human beings. Diversity means men and women. At least a 70-30 split on gender and if you can get there, then 50-50. Diversity today means having more than two ethnic backgrounds represented. Also important, you will need at least three substantively different sets of professional experience on the team to help avoid re-learning lessons. Finally, diversity means you will need a balance of learning styles to ensure that you don’t have too many left-brains or too many right-brains.

Notice that there isn’t an emphasis on communication style or personality type. Communication style is far less relevant than clear communication. A person can be wonderfully social and diplomatic, but if their requests and commitments are not clear, it won’t matter if you enjoy the conversation. On the subject of personality, I am not a big fan of personality typology (eg, Myers-Briggs, Enneagram, etc.) applied to teamwork. First, your personality isn’t something that you can do anything about. Second, it becomes very complex to map your profile against other profiles in a practical way. In my experience, what matters more in balancing a team is how each member prefers to learn. There are two basic learning styles: differentiators (those who naturally jump to analysis) and integrators (those who naturally jump to synthesis).

Differentiators enjoy comparing, planning, and keeping score (such as setting goals, achieving milestones, defeating competitors, setting benchmarks, etc.) They typically like to work on questions that deal with “what’s wrong.” Integrators enjoy exploring, building, and storytelling. They typically like to work on questions that deal with “what’s right.” You need both and they don’t naturally understand each other’s language or motivations and as a result are often suspect of each other’s value. Your job is to help translate from one to the other and to encourage a sincere appreciation of each style.

Notice that there isn’t an emphasis on competency. Getting someone who understands and agrees to the mission and communicates well is of far greater value to the team than someone who is particularly adept at one or more functional areas. You absolutely need talent on your team. But don’t fall in love with talent. Remember that a brilliant executive with clever ideas only gets them done if they work well with the rest of your team. Time and again, I have seen bursts of brilliance from an ego-driven executive that leads to sudden and celebrated gains. The momentary exuberance on the team fades away in a matter of months, not years, and it’s not long before that ego-driven executive is boxed into ineffectiveness or driven out of the organization. If you want to create sustained trust and superior performance, you need to balance gender, ethnicity, professional experience, and above all, learning styles.


Last Word

A mentor early in my career once said: “everything in business eventually comes down to two people coming to agreement” and in 25 years I have not found one example to the contrary. Even in a company of many tens of thousands of employees, every aspect of every decision and project always came down to two people. Sales rep and buyer. Customer service agent and client. Product manager and executive. Engineer and designer. Employee and manager. Entrepreneur and investor. So many combinations and permutations, and throughout all of those pairs of humans, whenever a few of them were in agreement on the mission, were clear in their communication, and respected each other’s value, a foundation of trust ensued and spread to hundreds of others.

It doesn’t take much to build trust and it is remarkably resilient under stress in a complex and changing world. Work hard on this, and you will create a great leadership team.

(c) 2008 BlueSevenPartners.com

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Article Tags: benchmarks, commitments, communication style, ethnic backgrounds, human beings, keeping score, leadership team, leadership teams, learning styles, left brains, milestones, myers briggs, personality type, personality typology, professional experience, rich diversity, right brains, setting goals, storytelling, teamwork



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