Three Behaviours of a Highly Effective Leadership Team
I, like many others, am a strong advocate for Patrick Lencioni’s model - The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, applying it in much of the work I do with teams. Lencioni’s principles tap into the DNA that underpins successful performance in any team.
However, there are three additional behaviours that have described what high performance looks like in all the exceptional leadership teams I’ve worked with.
As well as defining their purview as a leadership team, high performing leadership teams adhere to a number of key behavioural expectations; ways of working together that differentiate organisational leadership from functional leadership. In essence, these three behaviours involve putting the collective goals of the team ahead of individual functional goals.
Behaviour 1: Check your hat at the door
The role of the leadership team is to manage the strategic and operational activities of the organisation. When you’re acting as a member of a leadership team, your role is exactly the same - to manage the strategic and operational activity of the organisation.
When you’re in a leadership meeting, you’re not there to manage your department; you’re there to manage the organisation. You run your department the rest of the time. The simplest way to look at it is this - when you come into leadership team meetings, you take off your functional hat at the door. Of course, you may have to put it on again if there are specific decisions which require your subject matter expertise, or special insights that you can give because of your functional knowledge, but you’ll find that this is less frequent than you might expect.
The consequence of this is that you can expect to see the following in leadership team meetings.
- Everyone is expected to contribute to everything discussed, not just those matters that fall into their functional ambit.
- Everyone is required to help reach decisions that are for the better good of the organisation as a whole, not just good for you or your department.
Behaviour 2: Think laterally, not vertically
Until you become a leadership team member, your key relationships in the organisation are typically vertical: upward to your manager, and downward to your direct reports. From the moment you join a leadership team, your key relationships shift from vertical to horizontal. As of then, your first and overriding commitment will be to your peers - the other members of the leadership team.
Why? …
Because your key role will be to make decisions that are for the best of the organisation as a whole, not just for your functional group. There will on occasion be conflicts between what is good for your functional area and what is good for the organisation as a whole, and when those conflicts occur, your commitment must be to the organisation as a whole - represented by your leadership team members - not to your specific functional area.
This, of course, does not mean that you can no longer be loyal to your functional group. It also doesn’t mean that you cannot lobby for their best interests or represent their needs; indeed, you are expected to do just that.
Being an effective member of a leadership team frequently means using the word ‘AND’ instead of the word ‘OR’.
For example:
- Keep all the existing loyalty you have to your functional team AND add an overriding commitment to your Leadership team members.
- Focus on delivering the key deliverables of your functional team AND place achieving organisational goals above all else.
Behaviour 3: Show Cabinet Solidarity
Leadership team dialogue is vigorous and robust. People say what’s on their minds, challenge each other and the ideas presented. Sometimes it gets heated AND when the discussion is done and a decision is taken, the dynamic changes.
A cornerstone of the Westminster system of government for centuries, Cabinet Solidarity, means that no matter your personal position on an issue, once a decision is made by the leadership team it is issued and upheld collectively. You can voice all your concerns and objections on any issue while it’s being discussed behind closed doors, but when a final decision is made, it’s made by all of us. When leadership team members leave the meeting room, they stand side by side on decisions, indivisibly, jointly and fully supportive of the decisions they make as a team.
The implications of this are important:
- You don’t get to second-guess leadership team decisions. You don’t get to go into a colleague’s office (or worse still one of your own team) after a meeting and pick apart any decision that has been made. You don’t get to complain about or undermine any decision that has been made to anyone outside the leadership team meeting.
- You don’t get to obstruct, ignore, sandbag or avoid implementing any decisions or their implications or consequences.
- You do get to be a role model in implementing agreed decisions - swiftly, fully and with enthusiasm, whatever your stance was when the decision was being debated.
This doesn’t mean that leadership teams are infallible, or that people must act like robots and persevere with the consequences of poor decisions. Leadership teams make mistakes and sometimes a decision proves to have been the wrong one. When that happens, any leadership team member can bring evidence that a decision needs to be re-thought, but only after an agreed period of supportive endeavour, and only in a scheduled leadership meeting.
The term ‘One Team’ is often used without fully recognising the obligations that come with it, which these three behaviours embody. When you become part of a leadership team, you accept accountability for the stewardship and success of the whole organisation, on behalf of the owners and all your staff colleagues.
This is a different order of responsibility from that which leaders accept in all other supervisory and management roles. Fulfilling these obligations requires and inspires leadership team members to check their hat at the door, think laterally, not vertically and act as one team, with true cabinet solidarity.
Authored by Marshall Cowley, one of our leadership development specialists.
If you would like some help with leadership development and organisation-wide cultural change, contact Nicky at info@odi.org.nz.