“Management is about coping with complexity… Leadership is about coping with change” (John Kotter, Harvard Business Review 1990) 

The difference between managers and leaders is that while managers play a key role in coordinating, giving structure, achieving goals effectively, leaders are those who create vision, inspire passion and commitment, challenge the team, create values. Building and leading an effective team is one of the top priorities for business executives. Good team requires leaders who have vision and skill. 

Although leadership can’t be taught it can be learned.

 

BUILDING YOUR TEAM’S CULTURE OF SUCCESS

Leaders that build high performing teams also know how to build long-lasting teams.  Building a sustainable culture in your company will drive success by itself. How can executives build a thriving atmosphere that drives success? What are some behaviors leaders can adopt to create this culture?

LEADERSHIP BEHAVIORS

MIT Executive Director Robert Thomas proposes the following leadership behaviors:

• Seeing: Seeing and seeking different perspectives, from the eyes of your team members. Separate facts from assumptions. 

• Hearing: Attend to the dynamics of communication where facts and feelings are transmitted.

• Seeing and Hearing Yourself: Be an “insider” and an “outsider” 

• Living Values: Engage in constant dialogue with one's values and people and situations that form and test them. 

• Trusting: Build Trusting environments to foster collaboration and learning

• Challenging: Question assumptions, norms 

• Visioning: Build goals and milestones through collaboration

• Supporting others: Understand a sense of how people feel. Value relationships. Build trust and inspire.

Great leaders lead by example. They create atmospheres of mutual trust and respect that fosters communication, cooperation, innovation and transparency.

What have been examples of good leadership throughout your life? What are examples of leadership in your organization? What are the common behaviors or traits that make these leaders successful?  What kind of leadership behaviors produce positive results? And negative results? What time of leadership behaviors create open communication and foster cooperation? Can these behaviors be adopted by anyone in your organization?

DEFINE YOUR PROBLEMS

MIT Professor Nelson states “In my experience leaders who can formulate clear problem statements get more done with less effort and move more rapidly that their less-focused counterparts. Clear problem statements can unlock the energy and innovation that lies within those who do the core work of your organization.”

A well defined problem often contains its own solution within it. What are some steps we can take to define problems? 

1. Explore the current situation. What is the problem? What impact is it having? Consequences of not taking action? What is the human side of the problem?

2. Explain. Define the problem in its simplest form.

3. Ask yourself. Constantly ask yourself “Why is that a problem?” until you land into the source of all these problems.

What does a clear problem statement look like? A good problem statement should define:  

• Clear target/desired state

• Clear View of the current state

• Clear gap between them

HAVE CLEAR AND MEASURABLE GOALS

“If you have more than three priorities, you don’t have any.” - Jim Collins

What is the goal and how are we measuring progress, in other words, where are we going? And how are we getting there? 

Leaders should be able to envision what success looks like and have a way to track it, measuring progress along the way.

Adam Nash, executive in residence at Greylock Partners adds “When they’re on their own making decisions, they can be empowered to make those decisions because they know they’re aligned with the rest of the company” 

Leaders play a key role in making sure the team rows in the same direction. Setting clear goals and a tangible way to track the progress of those goals and having the team interiorise it is the first step, the rest follows as what everybody does will flow from those goals. 

BUILDING COLLABORATIVE TEAMS

Under the right conditions and culture, large teams can become highly collaborative and be able to sustain collaboration in large periods of time, achieving unexpected positive results.

Harvard Business Review characterises collaborative teams as those that: 

• Share knowledge freely

• Learn from one another

• Help one another complete jobs and meet deadlines

• Share Resources

Team leaders have a unique position to encourage collaboration, designing the tasks and company culture so they contribute towards collaborative and collective action.

What are some examples of collaborative behaviors that your company has adopted? Are they part of your company’s culture? Behaviors of the executive team are crucial to supporting a culture of collaboration. Is the executive team in your company visually adopting behaviors that foster collaboration?

DIVERSITY, MORE THAN A CHECKBOX

A 2015 McKinsey Report on 366 companies, showing and increase in returns above industry average whenever diversity is added to the team.

More studies conducted by Credit Suisse, show that organizations with at least one board member who is female resulted on higher equity return and net income growth. To reach highest levels in collective intelligence, the number of women should be above 50%. Ethnic diversity and diversity in cognitive styles are also main factors for boosting a teams CI.

DIVERSITY, MAKING YOUR BUSINESS SMARTER

Harvard Business Review gives us another insight about diverse corporate teams “Nonhomogeneous teams are simply smarter” Diversity plays a key role in increasing the collective intelligence of a team. Working with people that are different from you may challenge your brain and sharpen performance.

Diverse teams constantly reexamine facts and challenge status-quo, while remaining objective.  Research shows that individuals part of diverse teams were more likely to prize stocks correctly, and those who on the contrary were part of homogeneous teams tended to have more pricing errors . 

Research also shows that women and culturally diverse team members boost the capacity of a business to be innovative. Companies with more women were more likely to introduce radical new innovations into the market over a two year period.

LEADERSHIP OF THE FUTURE 

Large companies today are increasingly led by an ensemble of leaders rather than an individual. MIT Solan interviews more than 190 HR executives from global companies, they believed that top leadership groups in the future will be characterized by people with greater diversity of experience and thought styles. Senior Vice President of executive office operations at Four Seasons Hotels and Resort,  Ellen Dubois Bellay declares “The future leaders of the company will be more diverse. Diverse in terms of race, gender and so on, but also in terms of their experiences, we will always make better decisions from this vantage point”. Their research also shows that these ensembles of leaders will work more in collective action and make decisions relying on collective intelligence.

Conclusion 

Good leadership practices drive a team and a company to success. Take a second to evaluate the leadership of your company and move it a step closer towards the leadership of the future by:  

• Defining leadership behaviors that create an atmospheres of : 

  • Mutual trust 

  • Collaboration

  • Communication

  • Cooperation

  • Innovation

  • Transparency

• Defining clear problem statements

• Defining clear measurable goals

• Building collaborative and diverse teams

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