Leadership Teams Archives

Into the Lion’s Den: Fierce Kindness and the Commitments Senior Teams Daren’t Name

Some years ago I was at a business event, the kind with black ties, flowing champagne and a lot of people keen to talk to the star guest. That star guest was a very successful property developer, and he’d heard what I do. So, standing in a circle of his people, his PR team and the event hosts, he started quizzing me about his senior leadership team.

His questions had a lot of performance in them. His team, he told me (and everyone listening), couldn’t be trusted to deliver if he wasn’t around. There was a knowing laugh from the circle. I thought there was a taste of snideness to his words, aimed at people some of whom weren’t there to answer back. And maybe aimed a little at me too, to see how I’d react.

So I asked him if this was how he ran his team sessions. Whether he made the same kind of half-joking digs there, without ever quite naming what was going on or offering anything that might turn it around. Then I told him that, in my experience, an underperforming senior team was very often a leadership issue. His leadership.

You could have heard a pin drop. He shook my hand, quite firmly, and moved on.

Why I Said It

I’d love to claim some clever tactic, but what was going on for me was much simpler than that. I actually liked this man. I liked his drive and his appetite for risk. I liked the way he’d clearly built something big by refusing to play safe. And I thought someone like that deserved to have a bit of that directness given back to him for a change, because those very qualities probably meant it hardly ever happened. The people around him were far more likely to laugh along.

I also knew perfectly well that even if I wasn’t shown the door of that glitzy event then and there, I might just be quietly left off the guest lists in future.

Fierce Kindness and The Lion’s Den

One of the principles I hold most strongly about coaching, and about working with people generally, is something I call Fierce Kindness. I wrote about it in The 9 Types of Difficult People as a dynamic principle; two qualities that pull against each other and have to be actively held in balance:

The fierce part is the willingness to tackle difficulty head-on, saying clearly and respectfully what you think and what you need, and holding a boundary.
The kind part is listening properly, understanding the other person’s point of view, and offering support.

Fierceness on its own can tip into confrontation, or at least be heard that way. Kindness on its own slides into leniency, and the problem is allowed to carry on.

The image I hold for it is the old story of the lion with a thorn in its paw. Someone has to walk into the den and pull it out. The lion is in pain, it’s dangerous, and it has no way of knowing whether you’ve come to help or to hurt. You go in anyway, because the thorn needs to come out.

This matters for coaches in particular. We ask our clients to take risks all the time, in service of their goals and their own development. Have the difficult conversation we urge them, try the new behaviour, say the thing you’ve been avoiding.

It’s all very well doing good coaching when you, the coach, are risking nothing. But part of the discipline has to be recognising the moments when you must take a risk yourself, for the sake of the person in front of you, even if it’s someone you’ve only just met at a party.

The Thorn in Most Senior Teams

What that star guest was describing is one of the most common things I hear from senior leaders. Decisions get made and then drift. Commitments made at the board table dissolve on the way back to the office. (I wrote about one reason for that, confusion over which team you’re actually on, in an earlier article linked below.) Initiatives are talked about with real energy and never reviewed. Everyone knows a promise wasn’t kept, but nobody says so.

Patrick Lencioni describes this as a cascade. Teams that avoid honest disagreement end up with artificial harmony. Artificial harmony produces commitment that is only skin-deep, because the conversation that would have produced real buy-in never happened. And you can’t hold someone to account for a commitment they never truly made.

In senior teams there’s an extra twist, which is status. Admitting that you haven’t delivered, or telling a peer that they haven’t, puts at risk a standing that people at this level have spent decades building. So the team develops a habit of leaving it unnamed.

The frustration doesn’t go away, though. It leaks out sideways: in the corridor, in the car park, in a comment to someone outside the team. Or, in our star guest’s case, as a joke at a party, told to an audience about people who mostly weren’t there.

That’s the thorn. And a leader grumbling about it is walking round the outside of the den.

What Changed

He rang me about a week later and asked if I’d work with him. An offer I couldn’t refuse.

What made the difference in the coaching turned out to be surprisingly simple. We opened up the team sessions to a direct conversation about what he felt the leadership team needed to deliver, asked out loud with the people who had to deliver it. Alongside that, he and the other members of the team started asking each other a second question …

… what do you need in order to do that?

Those two questions together are fierce kindness in practical form. The first is the fierce part: saying clearly what’s required, to the people who need to hear it, instead of to a circle of onlookers. The second is the kind part: listening properly, assuming people want to deliver, and offering the support to help them do it.

Asked on its own, the first question tends to turn into blame, which is where our star guest had got stuck. Asked on its own, the second becomes a comfortable conversation that changes nothing. Together they made commitments real, because people had said to each other what they’d do and what they’d need, and so they could be held to it.

For You and Your Team

If you’re on a senior team and you know a commitment has slipped but haven’t said so, is that frustrating for you; and where is that frustration coming out? And if you’re a leader who has ever said, even half-jokingly, that your team can’t be trusted to deliver without you, it’s worth asking where you’re saying it, and who you’re saying it to.

Fierce Kindness is a choice about a way of being, and it asks something of us. We might get it wrong. Someone might shake your hand a bit too firmly and walk away. But the thorn is there whether we go into the den or not, and the lion is still in pain.

My experience, over a long career, is that people are far more grateful to the person who walks in than you’d ever expect. Sometimes they even ring you a week later.

More Support and Resources

I coach leadership teams who sense they’re not yet working well enough together. My flagship programme The Shift is a development experience that helps leadership teams strengthen trust, alignment and how they function together. The result for the organisation is clearer decisions, stronger collective leadership, and better performance.

Why It’s Normal to Feel Like You’re Not Quite There as a Team

If you could mind-read a senior leadership team, maybe 30 minutes into a difficult exec meeting, one thing you’d likely hear them asking is: “What is wrong with us!?”

And if you kept listening, you’d hear each of them holding an inner-voice running commentary on everyone else. That one’s being annoying. That one isn’t paying attention. That one is slippery-shouldered, and that one is cryptic in what they say. That one is way off-piste on what matters. And that one is forever vaguely threatening to use some power they hold, whether it’s position, knowledge or relationships, against the rest of us. All of them thinking it at the same time, and each appearing somewhere on somebody else’s list.

If you could see them sitting around that board table at a tough point in their decision-making, you might notice them thinking: “Why is this still happening to us?”, or, “Why are we still not good at being a team?”

What nobody says out loud is that each of them is holding a private sense of being somehow inadequate at this, or of being on a team composed of people who so often just seem wrong. That their team muddles through, but is a poor outlier really. And because none of them says it, none of them finds out that everybody else is thinking it too.

The Mythical Team

The standard they are failing against is the mythical team that has this handled. Not one they have ever been on, or even seen. Most of them have left a previous team over exactly these kinds of issues, and joined this one hoping it would be different. Somewhere, though, surely there must be a team where it all works?

I’d like to hire one of those planes that pull a banner, or write in the sky, and have it say:

THIS IS NORMAL • EVERY TEAM FEELS LIKE THIS • THERE’S A REASON IT HAPPENS • YOU CAN DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT

Which would be quite a long banner.

But one thing you can easily present in a team development session is Tuckman’s model. You know this one – Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing. Put that up and all the HR people will sit back, happy that you’re not going to disrupt anything.

Back We Go

What I’ve watched happen over and over is teams arriving back where they started. A team that had got itself into something like Performing, humming along, finds itself in a Storm again. Arguing (or avoiding conflict), annoyed with each other, feeling like there’s something wrong with them, and each of them thinking they’re the only team like this.

Susan Wheelan’s later research, which builds directly on Tuckman, shows that this is what teams do. They go back to earlier stages when their issues (more about those later) are unresolved. And development happens in a one step forward, two steps backward kind of way.(1)

I like Tuckman because of what’s implicit in it, not because of what it was intended to do. What I like is that if it’s true that teams develop in those stages, then it also makes sense to me that teams would regress in those stages too. Wheelan found exactly that.

Which is why Tuckman and Wheelan are still worth talking about, as a kind of map that tells you where you are when you find yourself back there.

What Sends You Back

I have my own view of what the causes of those ‘issues’ might be. And why so much of what happens for senior leadership teams will be bumping them back down the development stages, straight into a storm. I think it’s a long list, but if I had to summarise them, it would be into three groups of stressors, clustered around:

Team membership – who’s in, who does what, who liaises with whom, who controls what. A new CFO joins without any of the unspoken understanding of what is what: who defers to whom, which arguments are already finished. You can’t pick that up in an induction, however good the person. Your team will go back to the Stormingphase to resolve it
Team goals and objectives – what’s the latest priority, what’s slipping, where is the agenda coming from, what’s driving the focus
Team operating environment – all the usual PEST (Political, Economic, Social, Technological) stuff, plus the layer above the team, owners, investors, NEDs, plus the layer below including all their direct reports.

Phew!

Any and all of those types of change load the team up with issues they haven’t yet resolved and so, as Tuckman/Wheelan show us, there you are, back at the Storming stage.

It happens a lot more than you might think, because of a lot more causes. So much so, that I think we should regard it as a regular occurrence. You’re not a dysfunctional team. There’s nothing wrong with you. And you’re not abnormal.

But, you are likely to find yourselves quite often in a situation where the team isn’t flying along nicely, where everything is not humming away in functional harmony.

If you’re the kind of team who wants to do something about that, who wants to get to Performing faster, or know how to recognise and get out of Storming with greater regularity, I’ve got two more things to point you towards.

Deliberate Attention

First is that the senior leadership teams I see who are best at this kind of development, make a conscious choice to put at least part of their collective attention on to the issue of how well they are functioning as a team.

Most teams don’t do this, which is partly why they have that unconscious worry about being mediocre. But there are also good reasons why they don’t do it, including that it can be risky. If you want to know more about why that is and how to do your team development safely, take a look at this article of mine https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-senior-teams-avoid-conflict-how-everything-changes-nick-robinson-4mlce/

Persistence

Like everything worthwhile, the need to do this kind of team development work does not go away. It’s like going to the gym, eating healthily, staying married. The effort is day-to-day, repetition, not giving up and staying in the game.

Real-life persistence is messy. It involves tiredness, fear, frustration, annoyance, doubt. And above all, a small daily refusal to give up.

I have been coaching like this for a long time now. I have watched teams heading back into Tuckman’s Storm, helped them get past it, and then seen them go through it again when something else around them changes. It is the most ordinary thing in this work.

It will happen to your team, probably sooner than you expect.

What separates the teams who handle it from the ones who don’t, and who go on suffering for it, is not whether they end up back in the Storm. It is whether they can look at each other and say, here we are again, right, what do we need to sort out this time. And do it with sleeves rolled up and something close to enjoyment. That is the answer to the unspoken question, “What is wrong with us?” Nothing is. You’re a team, and this is what teams do.

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Why Senior Teams Avoid Conflict, and How Everything Changes When You’re a Crew on a Mission

Almost every senior leadership team I’ve coached with is avoiding conflict by ducking the same handful of conversations. And lots of them have unconsciously decided that just being ‘almost okay’ as a team is better than risking the wheels coming off by aiming higher.

Here’s the kind of conflicts they work so hard to avoid getting into:

the way that decisions are really made (not by consent in the meeting, but often elsewhere, in a corridor, in a WhatsApp)
that one or two members of the team often seem to be pulling in a different direction, with their own agendas
that the real priorities, the problems that the team should be solving, or the opportunities that they should be grasping, are somehow never properly explored
that the team’s own functioning is often just okay, and not something to write home about. And definitely not as well-functioning as they’d want other teams in the organisation to be.

And this isn’t just my experience.

Back in 1986 Chris Argyris described senior executives who had become genuinely skilled at avoiding conflict with each other. He called it ‘skilled incompetence’, because the very adeptness is what does the damage.(1)

Why Teams Avoid Those Conversations

What stops those conversations from happening, is that they are genuinely risky to have.

Senior leadership teams are under high-levels of pressure. And the unconscious calculation they seem to make is that ‘nearly okay functioning’, is better than the total dysfunction they fear might happen if someone opened the can of worms.

Here are some of the key reasons for playing it safe that I often uncover in my coaching with leadership teams:

Worrying that everybody is already under so much pressure. People ask themselves, “Can I say that my colleague isn’t delivering on one element of something, when they are already carrying so much else; would the wheels come off if I say it?”
Believing that they are personally at risk of being called out for something in return. If I say “Hey, we made this decision last month, why are we revisiting it now?”, is someone going to turn around and say something to me like, “Well Nick, if you’d delivered everything that was tasked to you, we wouldn’t have to be looking at it again.”
Depending on someone’s goodwill for your own functioning. For example, if I point out that a colleague’s actions don’t really seem to be consistent with the priorities we’ve agreed, will they take their ball home, withdraw co-operation with my department, and so cause my own work to degrade?
Looking to the Leader. People naturally defer to the team leader. If the leader isn’t naming an avoided conflict it becomes much harder for anyone else to name it. But leaders are cautious because they’ve been taught never to call someone out in public. Plus they know that naming it in the meeting also risks everybody swerving onto it, giving it too much attention, instead of none at all.

These reasons are part of the dreaded ‘psychological safety’, which has become something of a stick to beat leaders with recently.

But why it seems like a stick and not a solution is that the risks I describe above are not trivial. They genuinely might happen. And, if they do, they are likely to have big and out-of-proportion impacts. Psychological safety as a concept is only useful if we can find a way to be safe – and that can be very elusive.

The Cost

There is a cost to this, and it goes way beyond the leadership team. Allen Amason’s research with top management teams found that the ones who avoid task-focused disagreement, the honest argument about the work itself, make measurably poorer strategic decisions than the ones who have it out. And those are the decisions the whole organisation then has to live with, sometimes for years.(2)

I’ve spent a long time working with teams on how to overcome this. How do you stop avoiding the kind of conflict that might actually help really raise your team’s game?

The Usual Answer

The usual answer is to reach for a process. And there are some well-respected books about having difficult conversations, including Difficult Conversations by Stone, Patton and Heen, and Crucial Conversations by Grenny and colleagues.

These are most useful, in my experience, in beginning a dialogue about the need to not dance around conflict. And less useful for actually addressing it. Because the risks of saying “There’s conflict that we are avoiding” are themselves not always addressed. But if your team hasn’t done much work on this yet, take a look, and draw from them whichever aspects you feel are useful to your team and the situation you are all facing.

How to Sneak Up On it

My own approach is to come at it obliquely, with a rhythm that starts slowly before it builds.

I start by talking generally about what conflict avoidance costs. What it costs organisations, in performance and ROI. And what it costs team members, in their own day-to-day experience and the satisfaction they miss from not being part of a team that is genuinely flying along.

Then I ask people to relate that to their own experience. But not on this team. Elsewhere, in teams they volunteer with, or teams they used to work in. Anything that brings the lived experience into the room without the risks and threats.

And then I really cheat, which is where the rhythm picks up.

First, I cheat with time. I jump ahead. I’ll say, “Of course, all teams face these kind of challenges. I want you to imagine that here, we’ve already solved them. We’ve found the answer.”

And then I use a number of techniques to have people imagine, to feel, to see, what it might be like when they are really performing as team. If the things underneath that conflict, the decisions that kept getting circled back, the accountability that slips all the time, when they are gone, what will it be like around here?

That first cheat is a way to open the doors to safely consider a different, better way of operating. But it’s a simple cheat compared to the next one.

Bypass the Risks and Fears Altogether

Here’s one really powerful way to stop mucking about, stop tiptoeing around potential conflict, and stop leaving the important work and benefits on the table.

I want to say first that I don’t think this is the only way to do it. That’s partly because I’m a ‘never say never’ kind of person, and partly because I haven’t tried all the other ways yet.

My experience has been that if you really want to stop avoiding the kind of conflict that contains the seeds of truly great team performance, an exceptionally powerful way to do that is to work on who you are as a team and what mission you are on together.

Crew on a Mission

I have seen teams come alive like never before when they rehearse why they exist and explore who they serve. And I’ve heard a whole team gasp out loud in delight when I asked them to consider the legacy they wanted to leave behind.

When you start to believe in yourselves as a crew on a mission, something happens to those reasons for avoiding conflict. They don’t disappear. You still need your colleague’s co-operation next week. They can still call you out for the thing youdidn’t deliver.

But what changes is that none of it matters so much anymore. When you feel like a tight crew, and there’s something you’re all genuinely for, it changes things. The mission and who you are as a crew in pursuit of it becomes more valuable than any one of your individual positions. When you positively challenge a colleague, it reads as service to that crew on a mission, rather than as an attack on that person. And being challenged yourself costs you far less, because your own standing and your own ego isn’t really what’s at stake – it’s the tightness of the crew and the mission itself.

I grew up watching Star Trek, and part of that never left me. That crew on the bridge of the Enterprise never avoided conflict with each other. They had something they jointly stood for, their famous ‘five year mission’, and it was bigger than any one of them so they had to be a team.

Star Trek is fiction, of course. But it makes such a difference when senior teams seriously ask what they are jointly for. Not what each of them is accountable for. What they are for, and who they are together. When you’re ready to explore that question, then you can start really flying boldly.

More Support and Resources

I’m Nick Robinson. I coach leadership teams who sense they’re not yet working well enough together. My flagship programme The Shift is a development experience that helps leadership teams strengthen trust, alignment and how they function together. The result for the organisation is clearer decisions, stronger collective leadership, and better performance.

Longing for the Diamond Age

Every time we get a new Large Language Model version I get very excited that we might be about to enter The Diamond Age. For me that would be the payoff from all this investment in AI.

Written in 1995, The Diamond Age is a book by Neal Stephenson. It features a young girl, Nell, born into poverty, who receives an AI in the form of a book, the ‘Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer’, diverted into her hands by an act of rebellion.

Using the medium of story, the Primer educates Nell out of poverty and into a position to change the hierarchical society she was born into. Knowledge becomes Power.

And apart from that knowledge being used to change an unjust culture, what happens to Nell is what really makes my heart sing. Because in receipt of that education, she doesn’t become someone else, she becomes the fullest version of herself.

This is one of the founding principles behind my life’s work:

First, everybody needs to be treated as worth developing and educating. Then, if we take them seriously and give them access to the right tools, people can become everything they are capable of being.

One key part of what Nell does is to build a team. She brings together the usual story-like assortment of strangers and slightly strange people.

I don’t know if Stephenson intended it to, but the story also says to me that we can’t become the absolute fullest versions of ourselves on our own. That it’s not just purpose and meaning that are found with others, in teams, but also who we really are.

That’s part of why I love my coaching with leadership teams. When it works, they don’t just become a synergistic team together, they become the best versions of themselves.

The Newfield School, who I did some of my coaching training with, once put it something like this:

“We can only become who we really can be in the presence of others.”

It Is Lonely at the Top, and It Isn’t Just You!

You’re not imagining it, and you’re not doing it wrong. It really is lonely at the top. It’s such a cliché, but all clichés start with some truth. And there’s quite a bit of research to suggest that:

it is actually lonely at the top; and
it isn’t a failure of the person in that seat, or the people around them.

So why is it lonely at the top?

Barry Oshry* studied how people behave in organisational systems, and found that leaders at the top behave in remarkably similar ways whoever they are. Just because of where they sit.

He calls it the burden:

Those people carry the whole weight of the system’s complexity, and that pulls them away from the very people they lead.

So the loneliness isn’t a failing, or something that other people cause. It is baked into the senior leadership job.

*Reference: Seeing Systems (Berrett-Koehler) – https://amzn.eu/d/0hJKz4Pq

A few loneliness warning signs to look out for:

You’re carrying decisions you can’t fully talk about.
You try to look more certain than you feel.
People who used to be peers now sit on the other side of a line that would get messy if you crossed it too much.

What to do

If the research is right, then we can’t ever fully get rid of feeling lonely at the top. We have to learn to live with it.

You chose this job. You may not have known that loneliness would come with it, but there it is. I believe that leaders who do well need a great sense of defiant-celebration about them. They’re John McClane at the top of the Nakatomi Tower, cracking jokes and getting on with it.

So say it out loud, to your team and to your peers. If they’re feeling the loneliness at the top too, it’s the job, not them. Yippee-ki-yay!

Championing: the worthwhile risk of believing in people out loud

I am a romantic at heart and I like to see myself sword in hand, armour a bit dented, lifting others up right at the point when they need it most. If you work in a senior team, that moment appears in front of you more often than you’d think.

And one powerful way of doing it, is with the skill of Championing. This was forged in the world of coaching, but is absolutely a team leadership skill to always have in your bag.

It comes in different varieties, but here’s a good one to start with …

If someone seems a bit out of their comfort zone, say something like this:

“Look at how far you’ve already come. You didn’t avoid the hard steps, even though that took some guts. You can do this.”

My friends will tell you that I just can’t switch off my championing muscle. It isn’t always easy, because what you say needs to be something that you totally believe – otherwise people will sniff it out. So you may need to dig a bit to find it.

And it can be risky. People might let you down. You might Champion someone who hasn’t asked for it, and they reject it. (Never happened for me yet, but you never know – I believe it’s worth the risk!).

I’ll add other varieties of Championing and more about what it takes as I write more about this amazing skill in future Articles.

Leaders who are instinctively strong will probably already be doing a fair bit of Championing. If you’re already doing it and I’ve just given you a name for it – excellent. Keep going. The alternative, to be in a room full of team members no one ever lifts up is just unthinkable.

The Wonder of How People Tick

How people are, the range of how they see things, the sheer breathtaking depth of what makes them tick – is wondrous!

I want to peel back the lid on this a little and show how it relates to the coaching work I’m driven to do and what it means for a leadership team at work.

Mind You Don’t Kill It

There’s a danger to peeling back the lid. Because if you start peering around inside people with a focus that’s too sharp, you can kill the wonder of the whole.

Here’s how it works for me, when I do manage to keep the wonder but also manage to get under the lid of what makes people tick. It starts with a curiosity: What organises them? What are they making meaning from? What are they orienting by, often without knowing it themselves?

Importantly, this is not a technique, not something I switch on at the useful moment. It’s just where my attention naturally lives. The wonder of how people actually work is the most interesting thing in any room to me, and I have never found the bottom of it.

Wonder is a quiet, deliberate, almost zen-like state, even when it does take your breath away. It’s a quality of attention you choose to bring, and then stay inside. You hold people in genuine curiosity – and this is what goes beyond curiosity – you also hold the possibility that they will amaze you. And you keep holding it.

Attending to people this way opens them rather than reducing them. A lot of our working culture assumes the reverse, that to understand someone is to file them, to type them, to have them sorted and therefore done with. A kind of dissection. In my experience this is mostly not useful.

So what should you look for, if you want to discover some of that wonder in what makes people and teams tick, and peel back the lid on it a bit? And do that in a way that helps them?

Start with Aliveness

Aliveness is the first thing I look for. How alive does someone seem, right now. And what brings them more to life. And what puts out that light.

People might ask you, “Oh what are the tells, the little twitches that show how alive someone is?” And that is absolutely the wrong kind of question, because the moment you are hunting for aliveness in those details is the moment you have stopped really looking. Stay in the wonder, the curiosity and the possibility of being amazed, and you will see it.

Once you get a feel for what impacts someone’s aliveness, you begin to get a flavour of what they are filtering for, what they notice and reach toward, even when they don’t know they are doing it. This is at the very heart of what makes people tick.

And you don’t even have to guess at it from the outside. You can simply ask them. “I noticed you came alive when we talked about X. What’s important to you about that?” Even if you have to ask a few times, going deeper each time, they will tell you. It’s like people are just wating to hand over the keys to who they are, to be properly seen and held in wonder.

A small practical example:

A senior team I worked with had a member everyone had quietly decided was disengaged. Sat back, said little. But when I observed him, I didn’t think his aliveness was flat. It was more like a beehive, buzzing away inside, but you could only hear it up close. I caught it when a colleague turned and asked what he thought. He became alive. So I followed it up, and what mattered to him was being genuinely asked, his judgement actively wanted. The disengagement everyone had seen was nothing of the sort. He was waiting to be asked, in a room where being asked had real meaning for him.

There is more beyond that, and I won’t lay all of it out here. What’s necessary first, before they can feel alive at work. What that leads to, or makes possible. Those are straying into techniques and part of a job like mine is to be unconsciously-competent enough with them that they show the wonder, not kill it.

What an Artist Sees in a Masterpiece

A friend of mine is going to an event with the artist Lachlan Goudie in conversation with the historian Simon Schama, on what makes a masterpiece. The premise has stayed with me, because it holds a similar risk.

The risk is that learning to read a great painting might cost you the wonder of it. That once you can name the composition, place the period and explain the technique, you have turned a living thing into a problem you have solved, and you stop seeing it.

Goudie’s approach answers that. The first question he asks of a painting is not why it was made but how. For him the struggle between the artist and their materials is not incidental to the work. It is the work. Going that deep leaves him more in awe of the painting, not less. Schama calls the result an epic of what humanity is capable of.

That is what I am claiming for people. Read someone all the way down, their aliveness, what they filter for, what they value, the evidence of it, and if you do it in wonder rather than to have them sorted, you come out as Goudie does in front of the painting. More in wonder that something as intricate as a person can be revealed at all.

Teams are People Too – Really

Another thing that really helps is to think of the team itself as a person, who you might also find wondrous. A collective being that is the sum of them and somehow also its own thing.

I first met this idea on an ORSC course, where it is called the Third Entity. That methodology tends to read the collective as a system. And whilst I love systems thinking, I also don’t want to reduce a room of wondrous people to a mere system. So I see that team as a person, living and breathing. That is synergy in action.

Another small example:

I remember asking a team to consider what they were leaving behind for the people who would follow them. The room gave a kind of collective gasp, a single breath taken all at once. That was the team-person, showing itself. Briefly heard in something that brought them alive.

Teams of course have their own collective way of doing things, their behavioural ‘strategy’. How they run their meetings, how they delegate, how they hold one another to account. And if a team can see clearly the things that increase its collective aliveness, it can make different choices about the elements of that strategy, or simply be more willing to put its shoulders to the one it already has.

I have been doing this work a long time. And even when you can get under the lid with quite a degree of experience and insight, there is still no bottom to it. People and teams will still amaze you. They will still leave you in awe of them. This is the test of whether you are reading them in the right spirit. Not how accurate the reading is, but whether the curiosity, and the openness to being amazed, leave you with more wonder about how people tick. And on the good days, that is what I find.

Great teams don’t need to win every point, just the ones that count

I’m talking about that tough decision your top team needs to make, that then holds up over time. The reorganisation that doesn’t end up tearing the place apart but instead brings people together.

Doing all of this as a senior leadership team is genuinely tough.

When you’re in it, even if it does all come together, it may not feel like you’re actually winning at all. Instead, it may feel more like there’s always one more mountain to climb, one more difficult relationship to work with.

I’m very keen that the business teams I coach know what it takes to win.

And I’m actually even more keen that they know what this feels like. Because that feeling is what sustains their efforts over time. And it also suggests that we might need to take a slightly different route to how we measure your success as a team.

First though, let’s talk about one little shift that I often point leadership teams towards.

Winning day-to-day at work often feels only marginally different from losing. But that margin is what makes all the difference.

There’s a great analogy to be drawn from the world of tennis.

Look at Novak Djokovic, holder of the men’s records for 24 Grand Slam singles titles and 428 weeks as world No.1. Yet across their careers, Djokovic and his great rivals Federer and Nadal have won only around 52–54% of the total points they’ve played.

For not quite every second point – they’re actually losing!

And this can be why it feels difficult to know how you’re doing as a senior leadership team. Why we inevitably end up focusing on the things that don’t feel like a win, and not noticing those that do.

So the insight to take is that you don’t need to win every point, you need to win the points that tip the game.

For a senior leadership team, what tips games is alignment: how well you move together towards the same thing. McKinsey’s long-running Organisational Health Index, covering more than two and a half thousand organisations and eight million people, finds the same thing again and again — the healthiest organisations deliver three times the total shareholder returns of the least healthy. And Alignment, crucially, is one of the three pillars holding that up.

So if you want to know what makes a team win games, and how that feels so it becomes sustainable over time, do these three things:

First, ask your team, “What does it feel like, when we’re winning?”

And it may take a couple of goes at that, because what you’re likely to get first time around is a lot of people saying what it doesn’t feel like. They’ll say, “Not like we’re fire-fighting all the time.”

Ask the question again, “And when we’re not firefighting all the time and we’re winning – what does that feel like?”

Second, count and celebrate the wins.

There is so much caution against doing this. People worry that counting a small win will somehow divert attention from the next point in the match. And there’s some truth in that. It’s a skill for your team to learn together. Pause, count the win, take that energy into the next point.

Third, Alignment, and the health of your team, is so much more important than scoring individual points.

It’s both a feeling and a good metric. Ask yourselves, “Do we feel like we’re standing shoulder to shoulder?” And then look at the games you’re playing – are you winning more than you lose?

Teams win games and the best-aligned teams consistently win more.

About me

I’m Nick Robinson. I coach leadership teams who sense they’re not yet working well enough together.

My flagship programme The Shift is a development experience that helps leadership teams strengthen trust, alignment and how they function together. The result for the organisation: clearer decisions, stronger collective leadership and better performance.

If you would like to learn more about that work, please get in touch. https://www.nickrobinson.org/the-shift-leadership-team-development

LinkedIn Newsletter

Convictions: Leadership Teams is my monthly LinkedIn newsletter: longer, more personal pieces setting out what I’ve come to believe about leadership teams and the work of developing them. You’ll find it here:

https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/convictions-leadership-teams-7437896226198450177/

If you don’t think your team is amazing, who will?

This is the best bang-for-buck leadership tool I know – and most people shy away from using it, because it means sticking your neck out.

It starts with a question: at work,

How do you regard the people and teams around you?

Are they good; are they smart; are they trying their best?

Or are they careless, lazy, unthinking, unfeeling?

One huge lesson I discovered really early in my leadership career was that:

You can make an intentional choice about how you regard the people around you at work; and
That choice pre-determines what you actually get!

This is one of the most important choices I know for leaders to make and as we’ll see, it matters even more for whole teams, especially the one at the top.

If you think the people around you are lazy and unthinking, well, what a surprise, that is how they will be.

If you choose to see the people around you as amazing, full of innate ability, trying to do good, that is absolutely what you will get back.

And not only that, it’s a self-fulfilling, self-perpetuating dynamic, especially if you’re the kind of person who holds themselves to a high standard. Because that gives you the kind of impact that makes other people (often unconsciously) say to themselves:

‘Hey, you know what, Nick clearly thinks I am an awesome person. And if he thinks it, well, it must be partly true at least. I am going to try my best to live up to that. It makes me feel good. I’m going to raise my game with other people too, and show them how awesome I think they are.’

Okay, so I know what you’re thinking at this point (26 years of coaching does give me some Jedi powers), there’s always that one exception.

I say, ‘Hey think of people at work as awesome, and they’ll be awesome’, and you’re thinking of Bill. Bill is the guy who always seems to do less than he could, to take advantage. We all know a Bill.

The risk for you, if you start trying to think of Bill as amazing, is that he betrays that gift. This is a real risk. Do not use that as an excuse to tamp down on how you regard everyone else at work, though. Add Bill to your innate belief in the potential of others. And then if he doesn’t live up to it, decide whether there’s more work to be done with him. If you don’t do this, you will never hit your own full potential as a leader.

And there is an even bigger payoff waiting for you if you want it.

I have seen from so many coaching assignments that this mindset matters even more with teams. And the more senior the team is, the bigger the impact.

We know from Hackman and Wageman’s research that the senior team’s functioning is truly decisive. The whole organisation’s fate can hang on it.

So if you’re a member of a senior team, or even the CEO, how you regard your colleagues matters much more than you think. Whether you see them as amazing people with huge potential, or as lazy, unthinking and obstructive – it won’t just stay in that senior team. It reaches out from your boardroom to every corner of the organisation.

So you have to decide. Do you want a senior team that sees each other as less than amazing?

Or do you want to take a risk, and be the role-models for inspiring everyone’s potential?

About me

I’m Nick Robinson. I coach leadership teams who sense they’re not yet working well enough together.

If you would like to learn more about that work, please get in touch. https://www.nickrobinson.org/the-shift-leadership-team-development

LinkedIn Newsletter

https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/convictions-leadership-teams-7437896226198450177/

The Team You’re Actually On

Senior leadership teams have a keystone that no other team carries or rests upon in the same crucial way.

It literally holds the show together. And if you’re a senior leader who doesn’t know it’s there – then you are a problem.

Only at the point of that keystone – the senior leadership team – is the whole organisation joined together.

So this can start being a problem when someone gets promoted to the senior team for the first time, and continues if their CEO or MD either doesn’t get its importance or know how to deal with it.

Say you get promoted to Chief Financial Officer, CFO. That’s a big deal! All those responsibilities that come along with the car and the bonus.

Here’s the thing that can be VERY hard to wrap your head around if you’ve got a ‘C’ or a ‘Director’ in your job title.

If you are on the senior leadership team, then that is the team you are ON.

So far so obvious.

But what is much less obvious is that, as CFO for example, you are NOT a member of the finance team. You just head that up.

I go into senior teams and see it happen over and over. A room full of smart, capable people, but each one quietly still captaining their own function. No one really comfortable with sitting on the team they’re actually on.

It’s the difference between leadership and membership.

And when people get it wrong, what happens is that:

Silo-working becomes entrenched;
Mutual accountability on the senior leadership team becomes almost impossible; and
Performance down the line suffers.

That confusion, about which team you’re really on, is why your team agrees in the room, but those decisions and their commitment begin to unravel the moment people are outside of it.

We already know the organisational costs of silos are real and consequential. Work by Tett shows that fragmentation produces organisational blindness, with serious downstream costs.

And we can now see it in the data. When work went hybrid, studies by Yang and Zuzul et al. found cross-group connection (people talking across functions rather than within them) falling by around a quarter. That makes the job of holding a senior team together harder still for any CEO today.

The issue isn’t a failure of the individuals, and it isn’t just a conceptual challenge. It’s an identity problem. And almost nobody is naming it as one.

Senior leadership teams have to grasp this identity. THIS is who we are, and this is who I am as a Chief Something Officer – a member of that team. Get this right and the decisions stop unravelling, accountability comes to life.

Get it wrong, and that keystone never sets. The building comes down.

About me

I’m Nick Robinson. I coach leadership teams who sense they’re not yet working well enough together.

If you would like to learn more about that work, please get in touch:

https://www.nickrobinson.org/the-shift-leadership-team-development

Why I Said It

Fierce Kindness and The Lion’s Den

The Thorn in Most Senior Teams

What Changed

For You and Your Team

Further Reading

More Support and Resources

The Mythical Team

Back We Go

What Sends You Back

Deliberate Attention

Persistence

Further Reading

More Support and Resources

Why Teams Avoid Those Conversations

The Cost

The Usual Answer

How to Sneak Up On it

Bypass the Risks and Fears Altogether

Crew on a Mission

Further Reading

More Support and Resources

So why is it lonely at the top?

A few loneliness warning signs to look out for:

What to do

Mind You Don’t Kill It

Start with Aliveness

What an Artist Sees in a Masterpiece

Teams are People Too – Really

About me

LinkedIn Newsletter

Further reading

This is the best bang-for-buck leadership tool I know – and most people shy away from using it, because it means sticking your neck out.

About me

LinkedIn Newsletter

Further reading

About me

Further reading