Here are 14 signs that your leadership team might not actually be a well-functioning team:
Being merely a bundle of ‘reporting lines’ without shared work
Top leader(s) chairs their meeting and speaks most
Constant rabbit-holing and talking past each other
Spend most of their time reviewing PowerPoints
Members have many 1:1s with each other outside shared meeting time
Their meeting is canceled when the top leader isn’t present
Pleasing the leader, optics to get a promotion
Top leader(s) have the ‘final say’ on all decisions
Are involved in status update marathons
Are in endless meetings that could have been async emails/chat/videos
Maintains endless lists of ‘priorities’ that are mere ‘wishlists’
A mindset of striving for perfection, planning & controlling
Elephants in the room are left unaddressed
Blaming your people for the lack of results
Now, contrast this with the best ones I’ve ever seen:
Their meeting routine drives the work forward
Members have participated and co-created the strategy
The strategy contains clear trade-offs, clarity on what NOT to do
Uses cycles of ’90 day outcomes’ that they are working against together
Uses a tool like Trello, Notion, or Planner to capture projects and actions
Spend monthly recurring time for reflecting on and improving the team
Equal talking time; everyone makes proposals
They ask clarifying questions before reacting
Uses a different process for reversible and irreversible decisions
Clarity on which types of decisions need group consent and which don’t
Disagreement is seen as an opportunity to explore multiple truths
The role of meeting facilitator rotates between members
Uses asynchronous workflow: chat/audio/video for updates and unblocking
Reviews steering metrics to know if their shared work is progressing
Team works ‘on’ the organization: running experiments to improve its Operating System
Members name feelings and hold space for processing tension
Feedback is flowing freely between members
Asks: ‘is it safe-to-try’ instead of ‘is it perfect’?
Member’s learning goals are shared openly to help each other achieve them
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.