A colleague and friend of mine from England wrote about some great strategies to help team conversations. Enjoy and be sure to look up more of his work! Pam
The glue that holds a winning leadership team together is not some undefined ethereal force that only appears once or twice in a lifetime. It is the product of synchronised minds and attitudes.
You probably have, on the whole, the right team in place to get your company moving – but you may not know how to work together to strike gold. Our research suggests that there are six conversations that need to consistently take place within the executive team in order to deliver results far beyond what team members think possible:
1. Ambition conversations
What joint ambition would motivate every member of the team to take risks, make genuine personal changes and reach for the extraordinary rather than settling for good enough?
2. Relationship conversations
How will you make the time to build the mutual understanding of strengths, weaknesses and motivators that allow you to draw the very best out of each other – and to create the trusting environment that will permit truly searching and challenging debate?
3. Accountability conversations
How do you ensure that the tough conversations take place, those that are needed to hold each other to the highest standards – both of behaviour and on delivery?
4. Priority conversations
How do you make hard choices and get agreement about the few, key priorities which need to be driven? Not only the priorities for your customers and financial stakeholders but also the things you will focus on for processes and people to deliver those?
5. Delivery conversations
What will you do to overcome silo thinking in order to jointly plan and deliver the cross functional activity needed to drive results?
6. Learning conversations
However well you plan, your customers, markets and people will never respond exactly as you expect. Your ability to deliver, and to sustain progress, will depend on powerful and insightful conversations to understand what has happened and decide how to respond.
If any of these is missing, the effectiveness of your team will be compromised, results will be harder to achieve and your job as a leader will get ever more difficult.
Chris Henderson
We love helping you build an effective team! To increase the effectiveness of your leadership check out our Building Better Bosses Program or contact us at 604-349-8660 or pam@thepossibilities.ca