20 traits of stellar leadership teams

And 14 signs your leadership team might be dysfunctional

Here are 14 signs that your leadership team might not actually be a well-functioning team:

1. Being merely a bundle of ‘reporting lines’ without shared work

2. Top leader(s) chairs their meeting and speaks most

3. Constant rabbit-holing and talking past each other

4. Spend most of their time reviewing PowerPoints 

5. Members have many 1:1s with each other outside shared meeting time

6. Their meeting is canceled when the top leader isn’t present

7. Pleasing the leader, optics to get a promotion

8. Top leader(s) have the ‘final say’ on all decisions

9. Are involved in status update marathons

10. Are in endless meetings that could have been async emails/chat/videos

11. Maintains endless lists of ‘priorities’ that are mere ‘wishlists’

12. A mindset of striving for perfection, planning & controlling

13. Elephants in the room are left unaddressed

14. Blaming your people for the lack of results

Now, contrast this with the best ones I’ve ever seen:

1. Their meeting routine drives the work forward

2. Members have participated and co-created the strategy

3. The strategy contains clear trade-offs, clarity on what NOT to do

4. Uses cycles of ’90 day outcomes’ that they are working against together

5. Uses a tool like Trello, Notion, or Planner to capture projects and actions

6. Spend monthly recurring time for reflecting on and improving the team

7. Equal talking time; everyone makes proposals

8. They ask clarifying questions before reacting

9. Uses a different process for reversible and irreversible decisions

10. Clarity on which types of decisions need group consent and which don’t

11. Disagreement is seen as an opportunity to explore multiple truths

12. The role of meeting facilitator rotates between members

13. Uses asynchronous workflow: chat/audio/video for updates and unblocking

14. Reviews steering metrics to know if their shared work is progressing

15. Team works ‘on’ the organization: running experiments to improve its Operating System

16. Members name feelings and hold space for processing tension

17. Feedback is flowing freely between members

18. Asks: ‘is it safe-to-try’ instead of ‘is it perfect’?

19. Member’s learning goals are shared openly to help each other achieve them

20. Models the behavior shift they’d like to see in the rest of their organization

The red thread: participation, co-creation, equality, adult-adult, accountability, consent.

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If you’re part of a leadership team and would like to know more about how one of my colleagues at Unblock or I can help you, definitely reach out.