Leading a team! LET’S GET READY TO RUMBLE!
Is your organization ready for a good fight?
“And in this corner, weighing in at $57,253 an hour, fresh off a loss on their latest acquisition, with a combined record of 0-13-1,
your LEADERSHIP TEAM!
“And in the challenger’s corner, a critical decision about your strategy which requires collective will and unanimous support…
DING-DING!”
Are your decisions becoming more critical and yet feeling easier and easier to make? Is your organization caught in a decision-making cycle that spends time and money yet yields little results? Has the quality of decisions increasingly been poor, with little innovation?
Perhaps what’s happening is a move to the middle, and a slow progression towards what is safe. While tension-free decisions may feel like progress, they can also be a slow crawl towards mediocrity—the reverse of successfully leading a team.
Successfully Leading a Team Takes Work
Successful leadership prioritizes well-informed decision-making
One hypothesis would be that to increase your likelihood of success, you need to increase the tension and discomfort that goes into your decision-making.
Successfully Leading a Team
Many of you may be saying “our culture is inclusive and respectful! We don’t have to disagree to get a good result! Why do leaders need to enable a good fight? Can’t we all just get along?” The answer is, succinctly, no.
While we need to ensure that conflict doesn’t lead to new fissures in the organization, the truth is that every organization comes perfectly equipped with its own “seams.” Those seams may be between individual leaders, functions, or departments. And it is those seams that create unique perspectives that are critical to good decision-making.
Leading a team to success and good decision-making requires diversity in thought which means exploring differences, appreciating uniqueness and uncovering underlying values, beliefs, and biases. This is especially true given the sheer complexity of our worlds (our markets, our data, and our issues) today.
So if difference is built into our organizations and something that we must learn to leverage, how do we as leaders enable a good fight? Leading teams at work means everyone:
1. Knows the rules.
Is this a caged MMA fight or boxing? How long is each round? How many people can you have in your corner? What happens when you get stuck in a submission hold?
If you’re leading a team to success, setting up your team to debate and disagree with each other without giving them a set of explicit ground rules is akin to watching gladiators fight lions. It might be interesting, but someone is not going to leave the ring well.
2. Has appropriate self-awareness.
Are you a flyweight or middleweight? All participants have to have a relatively good understanding of the biases and beliefs they bring to bear on a decision, or a leader has to help them increase that awareness.
Part 2A to this is that it is the fighter’s responsibility to know who they are fighting. Are they a mean southpaw? Do they tire after you let them workout in the ring? Understanding your “opponent” in a fight allows you to be more productive and ensures that whatever your strategy, the relationship between the two of you can come out of the disagreement positively.
3. Understands the size of the “purse.”
Critical to a good fight organizationally is a collective view or vision of what “winning” looks like. Be clear where and when you want to end up and help your team win as leaders, even if individuals have championed ideas or perspectives that are not our end result.
4. Is rigorously prepared.
Fighters will tell you it is the three months leading up to their fight that matter, not what they ate for breakfast that morning. Having a good fight, whether in the ring or the boardroom, requires discipline, preparation, and rigor—all elements of leading a team to success.
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5. Maintains safety above all things.
Just like when a doctor calls a fight due to injury, it is a leader’s job to know when things are becoming personal and detrimental to an individual leader, and they have to be prepared to step in and call the fight or move it to a safer ground. Additionally fights need to happen in a sanctioned time and place – not an impromptu street fight by the water cooler.
We tell our kids that if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. We scream at them to “stop fighting!” If that same posture is taken by leaders in our organizations today, our decisions will be one-sided, based on a limited data set, and likely not yield the kind of results we are looking for.
If you want decisions that are thoughtful, creative, and accurate, then you’ve got to be ready to rumble. These actions and information are foundational to leading teams at work. And chances are if you create a culture where that is not only acceptable, but welcomed, you will have everyone in your corner.