Are you old enough to remember Monopoly? ‘Do Not Pass Go: Do Not Collect £200’– you couldn’t continue with the game until you’d achieved something specific. In similar way, a team can’t do real work together until they’ve done something specific, and that one thing is to develop a foundation of trust.

A recent client group was a team made up of functional specialists, yet responsible for the leadership of the function across a large organisation.  But they were working as singletons and making no headway with their collective task of leadership. They spent barely any time together and rarely ‘leant in’ to find the expertise and support within the team.

But something we did with them helped them to make a significant shift. As part of an AwayDay they each presented a short storyboard of their life including: who or what influenced me to become the leader I am today? What legacy did my parents leave me? What’s important to me outside of work? Each took a risk to share, to be open, vulnerable…

And they listened to each other, rapt at the stories of other people’s lives – these people they had worked alongside for some years yet had never really known. They were curious about particular decisions; they empathised at descriptions of tough times; they exclaimed at things they had in common; there was a lot of laughter.

They left the session just that bit closer, with a new appreciation of each other and what each brought, amazed at how something so simple had changed the way they saw each other. They said they felt more connected and that something significant had changed in the way they related to each other. The building blocks of a trust had been put in place. They were getting ready to pass Go…

Helena
Helena Clayton
Director of Executive & Leadership Development Programmes

Last week we discussed trust, the foundation of Lencioni’s (2002) team effectiveness pyramid. This week we look at the next level  - the capacity to engage in trust-based conflict. In later weeks we will look at collective commitment, mutual accountability and a focus on results.

What’s the talk like?

Think about the team you work in. How many conversations don’t take place that perhaps should? What is stopping you and colleagues from having them? What assumptions, sensitivities and fears are in play? How well do you honestly recognise what is going on inside yourself let alone in others?

In the presence of these potential barriers, just what gets talked about in your meetings? How do these meetings sound, look and feel to you? How much do you give of yourself? How much gets achieved? How much do you look forward to the next one?

Getting stuck, or getting stuck in?

We see many teams that are stuck. The quality of their engagement with one another is stale and limiting. Their energy is often highest around done-it-lots-before execution topics. There is a sense of confidence about these familiar places. And there is usually an easily identified expert to carry the load, and the can.

We see fewer teams that really get stuck in to complex issues with a fearless energy and passionate detachment that generates a high tempo of collective exploration and learning. Each exchange creates new insights. They reflect together. They learn together. Quickly. Effectively. They commit collectively to decisions. And they lead collectively with conviction.

Seems a bit of a challenge?

The great news is that developing trust and the capacity to engage in creative conflict is possible. Yes, it is potentially challenging for some people. Teams are something of a brown-field site and a tailored development approach will always be required.

So, what will you do today to get out of stuckness and start getting stuck in?

Dave
Dave Stewart
Director
The Fresh Air Learning Company

Last week I titled this blog “In teams we trust”. This week I have changed the words around a bit to position trust as a key enabler of effective team-ship.

Lencioni (2002) posits trust as the foundation of a team effectiveness pyramid rising successively through the capacity for challenge, collective commitment, mutual accountability and a focus on results.

Strength through vulnerability

The sort of trust I am talking about here is the readiness to open up without fear of being taken advantage of in some way. To share hopes and fears, ask for help, admit mistakes, apologise and expose skills gaps.

Difficult in environments characterised by big egos, competition and fear. Yet possible.

Getting real with one another

We facilitated a leadership team retreat in the Brecon Beacons. The brief was to help develop their resilience ahead of a corporate restructure. In essence the task was to help develop trust and collaboration where competition was the norm.

And so, over two nights and two days we created a light appreciative inquiry-based framework within which the team got to know themselves and one another as real people. Communal bunkhouse living and the outdoors enactment of a collaborative storyline allowed the team to really meet itself for the first time.

“We have had conversations here that we could never have had back in the workplace.”

“I remember the moment clearly, the moment when I started experiencing my colleagues as real people; people I wanted to be with, to really engage with, to lead the business with. Up until then we had been kidding ourselves that we were a leadership team!”

Sparking and igniting

For sure, the team has a path yet to travel. However, the spark of self and collective awareness ignited the start of some powerful listening, disclosure and respect.

There are other tools and techniques to help build the foundations of trust in teams. Whatever approach is used, it does need someone to step forward and invite others to explore the courageous notions of trust and vulnerability.

Could that be you?

Dave

Dave Stewart
Director
The Fresh Air Learning Company

Clients approach us to design and deliver leadership team development programmes. We explore their needs and sometimes we tell them they don’t need a team. We advise them to spend their money elsewhere. They are surprised.

Getting the requirement right

They may not have thought very hard about what they need from their so-called leadership teams. Sometimes they use the term ‘leadership team’ when others might more properly use the term ‘working group’ or ‘project team’.

We invite them to consider the nature of the team’s purpose and goals, the level of interdependency between the entities their team aspires to lead, and the appetite of the team’s participant-leaders to put common purpose and courageous mindful conversations ahead of ego and personal reward. This helps create some clarity about what is required, and a dawning insight into the investment needed.

So, what does an effective team look like? There are lots of models of course, and we will dip in and out of Lencioni’s model (2002) over the coming weeks.

Pain and commitment

Real teamwork is powerful but cost some pain and commitment to do properly.

There is a level of trust required between participants to enable robust compassionate challenge that in turn begets collective commitment to execution and a preparedness to hold one another to account in the service of achieving the desired results.

Pyramid investing

And so there is a pyramid of capacities to be developed and sustained from the bottom up: real trust and openness, robust compassionate challenge, collective commitment to decisions that may not be unanimous, mutual accountability, and a focus on results.

Many leadership teams are great at setting goals and holding others to account. They are great at being surprised and frustrated when goals aren’t met. And they are great at scapegoating people outside the team, down the line. They have failed to invest in their own pyramid.

Trust

How do you develop real trust and openness in your leadership teams? See next week’s blog for some of the things we do to help clients build their pyramids.

Dave
Dave Stewart
Director
The Fresh Air Learning Company

In our last blog Helena Clayton wrote about how making small changes can have a big difference. She illustrated this through the real story of how an exhausted CEO discovered energy, strength and bounce by re-discovering his passion for art. Re-engaging with Ansell Adams’ work revitalised his work and home life.

Bigger than your job spec

It is a short step from this story to muse, to hope, to know that many or most people in organisations have passions which make them come alive, which make them fully human, which make them bigger than their job specs.

How easy it is to only think of organisations as machines built from neatly interlocking job specs and fuelled by revenue. If thinking begets action then Gareth Morgan’s machine metaphor [1] will only get you so far.

A persistent feature of major setbacks and disaster are inspirational stories of leadership, resourcefulness, compassion, heroism and sacrifice. These qualities seem to gush forth regardless of job spec or position within an organisation’s power structure. And yes, there is an opposite side to this shiny coin. One conclusion perhaps is that we are all so much more than our job specs. For better or worse.

A disabled work place

So, what is it about the way we organise ourselves at work that masks who we are, reduces what we are able to offer, maybe even disables us? Why do we leave so much of ourselves at home? Why do we play avoidance games at work? Why are we all so disinterested and lacking in curiosity about one another? If we think of organisations as a set of human relationships, how constrained and disabled do these feel where you work?

And why does it take a major set back or a disaster for people to discover how resilient they are, or are not?

A leading and enabling role

How much does your organisation invest in transformation and continuous improvement where part of this is the pursuit of a target set of values? Is there an assumption that a list of words on a flipchart and some workshop effort will somehow enable these to be realised; and that this effort will deliver performance and deepen resilience?

How would it be if you could notice, value and enable what already exists? What could you do to unshackle what is already under your nose?

How can you as a leader create the right environment for your people’s highest positive qualities to come to the fore and be a resilient part of business as usual rather than as an exception in extremis?

Dave
Dave Stewart
Director
The Fresh Air Learning Company

We know that part of what makes us resilient is being able to draw on resources when we need them. Sometimes that means reaching out to others and asking for help. At other times it means going inside and resourcing ourselves.

Running on empty…

Working with a CEO, he had realised that while he was doing a great job of leading his organisation, he was feeling empty inside and it was getting harder and harder to put on a bright and brave face. In our coaching sessions, he said he he’d lost his spark and felt bored with who he was. He wondered how long he could keep up the pretence and felt it might soon impact his work.

In talking this through, he realised that it had been ages since he had done anything for himself, in particular things he used to love doing. He was spending lots of time at work and then there would be evening networking events. Then he’d spend the weekend with his kids at their various commitments as part of family life. He enjoyed all of that.

But there was nothing that he did that was for him alone. No wonder he felt dried up. And, as we talked, he identified his love of art and photography as something he’d loved, lost touch with, and greatly missed.

Matching the inside and outside…

A week later, I get a call.

Hey, Helena, guess where I am? I’m sitting in the car in Bristol and I have a gap between meetings. I’ve got my iPad out and I could do some work. But there’s an art exhibition round the corner…and I’m going to it instead!

Two weeks later and he’d also been to see Ansel Adams in Greenwich – also in between meetings.

When we met, he laughed and said he had his mojo back and was feeling so much more positive about life. Now his inside matched his outside. He felt much more able to tackle the challenges of work and he’d noticed he was doing more stuff with his kids. ‘Amazing,’ he said, ‘how such a small thing has made such a big difference’.

Try this now…

What do you love doing that you’ve lost touch with? What one small thing could you do to reconnect you with yourself? A small thing can make a huge difference.

Take a risk and do it now.

Helena
Helena Clayton
Director of Executive & Leadership Development Programmes
The Fresh Air Learning Company Ltd

In our last blog we drew attention to the resilient nature of comedians. This week, we are thinking about adaptability.

Crystal balls and black swans

It’s impossible to predict the shape or size of your organisation’s next set back. But you can think about and plan for potential issues. Being prepared isn’t the same as knowing what’s coming. It’s about having the capacity to manage – to adapt – to whatever’s thrown at you. Especially the things you don’t know about. The Black Swans.

Goalkeepers and penalty kicks

We drew on the rehearsed and improvisational skills of comedians last week to illustrate aspects of resilience.  Let us now think about football goalkeepers.

They know penalties are a possibility; but they don’t know when, which game, or who the penalty taker will be.  They train for the generic possibility. And they draw on a combination of imaginal, mental and physical capacities to adapt and react to the unfolding reality of the penalty kick.

And when it is over, they rejoice or they pick themselves up, re-focus and press-on with the game.

The 7 Ps

Organisational life may not have quite such binary outcomes. Sometimes, of course, it does. Whatever, we believe that resilience has a lot to do with preparation.

In fact we are pretty clear that the old adage, oft used in the military, of Prior Planning & Preparation Prevents Piss-Poor Performance lies at the heart of resilience. We are also pretty clear that Planning & Preparation does not just centre on a single “Plan A”. It is about planning and preparing the capacity to operate simultaneously on physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual levels.

Dave
Dave Stewart
Managing Director
The Fresh Air Learning Company Ltd

The capacity to bounce back after a set back – resilience is such a hot topic across the business world.

In our last blog we drew attention to simplicity. This week, we explore improvisation.

Could it be innate magic?

Comedians are resilient people. They operate on their wits. Or seem to…

How do they operate so effortlessly in-the-moment – to use things they see, things people say – to trigger creative and amusing trains of thought? To take knocks, yet win their audiences over?

Comedians are people who notice things. Exquisitely so. They are also curious. They reflect on what they notice, and they make sense of this in surprising ways. They create and clearly communicate points of view to their audiences.

Comedians also know where they are journeying to. They hold a clear intention. And they get there based on a lot of pre-thought and rehearsal, the use of guiding themes, and the practised ability to spot and develop surprising and amusing connections in the moment, at the right moment.

That is how they survive and thrive.

Nope!

Their improvisation skills are part nature and part nurture.

So when we say they operate on their “wits” I wonder if we are failing to credit them for their many hours of hard exploration and developmental work, of rehearsal, of experimentation and live learning?

Maybe we are also exposing an almost cultural or systemic inattention to investing in the development of “soft” improvisation skills. It is as if we categorise improvisation as a “magic” possessed, innately, by only a chosen few.

It isn’t.

Maybe it is time to notice, reflect, and act on the training and development of improvisation?

Dave
Dave Stewart
Managing Director
The Fresh Air Learning Company Ltd

The capacity to bounce back after a set back: resilience is such a hot topic across the business world.

In our last blog we drew attention to the human dimension of resilience. This week, we are giving the philosophy and practice of simplicity a mention.

Dangerous lip service…

A quick scan of books and articles about resilience suggests a handful of concepts, systems, processes, “things”, characteristics and behaviours that make up the resilience “check list”.

Surprisingly, simplicity doesn’t feature.

We seem to have constructed such a complex world for ourselves that resilience measures, where they exist, can also have a sense of complexity about them. So much so that, throughout an organisation, lip service can often be paid to them. “Why should we spend time and money doing that?”

And when we say our world is “complex” we often forget that this sense of “complexity” is in large part a mental construction. We are expert at telling ourselves the “complex world” story. It has gone viral. Everyone is telling this story to one another!

Leading simply, simply leading…

What would it be like if there was a different story being told? A simple one? One you could write or draw on a single sheet of A4? Or tell in a few moments? What would it be like to have clarity of purpose? Simplicity of practice?

How much easier could this make your day-to-day experience? More fruitful your endeavours? What could this do for your capacity to bounce back from a set back?

So, who is making your life simpler? Who is attending to your bounce-back-ability?

Who is creating and telling the “simplicity story”?

Dave
Dave Stewart
Managing Director
The Fresh Air Learning Company Ltd

The capacity to bounce back after a set back. Resilience is such a hot topic across the business world.

But how many organisations really understand and invest deeply in the people dimension of this?

And governments across the world recognise to some extent their duty of care for the resilience of their national infrastructure. Power, transport, data, and other aspects. Organisations invest in lots of tangible things such as back up sources of power and duplicate databases. Banks and supermarkets would look sheepish if their computers and deep freezes didn’t work.

All good stuff. But not enough.

Cohesive, focussed and fired-up

How many organisations value personal and inter-personal resilience?

How effective under normal circumstances are the leaders and teams in your organisation? Dysfunctional? Just good enough? Maybe even pretty good? How do you know?

What could things look, sound and feel like under survival circumstances? Cohesive, focussed, and fired up? Or something quite different?

How much is invested? Which budget does this come from? Training, or risk, or somewhere else? It makes a huge difference. One budget is more resilient than the other!

Realistic optimism

There is a lot to unpack in the personal and inter-personal dimensions of resilience. We will explore more fully over the coming weeks.

For the moment, consider how well you think you know your thought processes. What are your patterns, your habits of thought? And what drives your actions? And what is the impact on those around you. When have you been a resilient leader? How do you know any of this? What is the nature of the relationship you have with those around you?

Are you able to fully grasp what is happening around you right now, yet still hold and drive to the clear possibility of a successful outcome? Realistic optimism, faith if you will.

More than databases and deep-freezes. More in future blogs.

Dave
Dave Stewart
Managing Director
The Fresh Air Learning Company Ltd