It is a familiar maxim that on any team it is leaders who “set the tone”.

When one thinks of this tone setting, several examples tend to come to mind.

Perhaps it is leaders living by the rules and modeling the behaviors that they are asking of those they lead.

Perhaps it is consistently enduring any hardships they are asking of their teams right alongside them.

These are all great examples that are critical to good leadership, but in all of the conversations I have had over the years on this topic, there is one element that is not discussed as much I would expect given its importance; setting the tone for the energy and attitude of your teams.

This is just as critical, if not more so, than any other tone setting responsibility that leaders have because of one simple fact...energy and attitude are contagious!

The energy and attitude a leader projects spreads through their team like wildfire, whether they want it to or not.

Two of my favorite quotes on this phenomenon come from Generals Dwight D Eisenhower and Hal Moore; two US Army commanders who needed to set the tone for large teams facing long odds (most famously Eisenhower during the Normandy Invasion in World War II and Moore at the highly chaotic Battle of LZ X-Ray during the Vietnam War).

Eisenhower said:

“Optimism and pessimism are infectious, and they spread more rapidly from the head downward than in any other direction.”

Eisenhower’s point here was that leaders had to project the energy and attitude they wanted their teams to meet the current moment with because it is the attitude of the leader that is the most contagious within an organization or team.

Moore was slightly more blunt on this responsibility.

He said that in moments of strain or adversity,

“Two things a leader can do, he can either contaminate his environment and his people with his attitude and actions, OR he can inspire confidence.”

In essence, Moore is saying that leaders cannot avoid setting the tone for their teams in tough times (even if they want to abdicate that responsibility).

Those you lead are actively looking to determine how they should process and respond to these moments so to Moore’s point, your attitude and actions can either inspire the right tone to be taken by your team to meet the moment and succeed or they will contaminate it and propagate a tone amongst the team that will drive failure.

If you lead a team, your energy will be contagious, whether you like it or not, so you have to constantly assess whether you are carrying yourself in a way that you want to see perpetuated by your team.

This is not easy business, because every leader of every stripe has one thing in common…they are human!

So like any other human, different situations (especially challenging or unexpected ones) trigger emotions that can overwhelm them and drive them to react unproductively.

Having the wherewithal to understand the energy that the moment needs and demonstrating the attitude and actions that will meet it successfully is both difficult and emotionally taxing.

It is also a non-negotiable skill for leaders to master if they want to help their teams grow and win.

Injecting the right energy at the right moments…the toughest of leadership skills

The toughest part about leadership is how situational it is.

The right type of leadership in one condition or environment could be the wrong type of leadership in another.

There are constants of course like high character, integrity, clear communication and care for those you lead etc., but the attitude and energy that a team needs in different moments is a moving target that leaders need to be adept at recognizing and adjusting to.

One type of energy can be exceedingly effective in one situation or circumstance and disastrous in another.

When do you inject an energy and attitude of urgency and intensity versus one of understanding or levity?

When do you come down hard on a team versus knowing when to back off of them and give them room to breathe?

When do bring a high energy or animated approach to team in order to fire them up versus a cool and collected approach to calm them down, pick them up from a stumble or re-focus them?

A team of inexperienced or poor performers will likely benefit from an intense, directive and commanding energy from their leader to get them on track, whereas a team of rock that have stumbled in their attempt to achieve a lofty goal would likely be turned off and disengaged by that same approach.

Great leaders understand how to inject the right energy to fit the current needs of the team.

This requires them to not only know their team but also understand the moment or environment that team is facing and adjust their energy and approach accordingly.

They model the energy they want to see become contagious amongst the group to best meet the moment at hand.

My leadership debt to Dr. Peter Venkman

A great example of this phenomenon can be seen in the 1984 movie Ghostbusters.

Towards the end of the movie, Egon Spengler, played by Harold Ramis, turns to the rest of the team and tells them that in order beat the current foes they were facing, they were going to have to do something dramatic.

They were going to have to “cross the streams” of their ghost catching beam guns.

Earlier in the film, Egon had cautioned the team against this very same practice because it could be very dangerous (as he put it then, “it would be bad” 😊).

With the Stay Puft marshmallow man climbing up the building toward them and Gozer the Gozarian standing menacingly before them, they knew they had to do something if they wanted to win the day.

Everyone looked towards Pete Venkman (the informal leader of the group), played by Bill Murray, to try and gage his reaction to the plan.

Pete looked at the faces of his teammates and could see that they were all nervous; they needed reassurance that there was hope for the plan to work.

All of a sudden, he boisterously slapped one of his teammates on the cheek and yelled:

“I love this plan! I’m excited to be a part of it! Let’s do it!”

Given what he had heard from Egon about this course of action earlier in the film, he no doubt had reservations about it but recognized in the moment that the team needed confidence in order to achieve their goal and that is the energy he injected into that moment.

He knew both his team and their situation and adjusted his energy appropriately to model the confidence they would all need in order to successfully meet the moment.

I have stolen shamelessly from this moment in my own career.

I have used this line and its associated energy with teams of mine throughout the years in times of uncertainty or nervousness and whether it be with a platoon of tankers in the Army as a young platoon leader or with a group of machinists on a shop floor that were under a lot of stress as a production supervisor, it has never ceased to produce a positive result.

Thank you Dr. Venkman😊.

Putting it all together

If you are leading a team of any kind, the energy and attitude you bring to the table is contagious (whether you want it to be or not).

Your team will follow your lead as to how to respond to the current moments they face, so it is important that you are bringing the type of energy and attitude you would like your team to adopt in those moments to best meet them.

Different leadership energy is needed in different situations.

A leadership attitude and approach that is wildly effective and inspiring in one situation could be equally disastrous and disengaging in another.

Great leaders understand how to inject the right energy at the right moments that will put their teams in the best position to win if they emulate it.

This requires both knowing your team as well as knowing what they are going through and adjusting your approach accordingly to put them in the best frame of mind to meet the moment required of them.

Understand your team, their situation and what energy they need from you to set them up for success.

Give your team their Pete Venkman moment when they need it!

When employees or team members of any group are asked what the biggest area of improvement needed in their organization is, the most common answer given, regardless of industry or endeavor, is the same…COMMUNICATION.

In our modern digital world this seems like a crazy notion.

When you survey the landscape of any business, whether they be brick and mortar facilities or remote work digital environments, you would assume that communication would be the last thing to be lacking.

Offices and shop floors are littered with mission/vision/values posters, shop floor communication boards at every cell and even wall mounted digital flatscreen displays streaming a combination of current organizational information and even real time data.

In remote work environments, company web portals are littered with real time updates, corporate leader messaging pages and marketing driven communications of the latest company activities.

Yet the feedback does not change…communication is seen as a gap by most employees.

How?

Given all the information we pump out into the world via our various digital and web based means at our fingertips, it would seem impossible for communication to be a problem.

Yet it continues to be.

While the reasons for this are numerous, one prevalent one that I have noticed on multiple teams is the fact that for all of the information that is put out there through our modern technology, very little of it speaks to the issues that employees care about or can use.

We either saturate them with more information than they could possibly use (reducing clarity that would allow them to act while amping up confusion) or we fail to communicate the information that people actually care about (disengaging them by failing to speak to their concerns).

I think of the Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem, “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner” in which the titular character is stranded at sea.

Though he is surrounded by water, he is dying of thirst.

Why?

Because the water is not potable.

Even though there is endless water all around him, it cannot be used to quench his thirst.

As Coleridge puts it:

“Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink”

Now think about this in the context of the information we are flooding our teams with through our various digital avenues.

How much of it is clear, actionable and speaks to their concerns versus how much of it is window dressing or advertising?

In many organizations, your teammates face the same challenge that Coleridge’s ancient mariner did.

Though they may be surrounded by information every day, there is very little of it that they can actually use to learn, grow or improve results.

To paraphrase Mr. Coleridge,

“Flat screens, flat screens everywhere” 😊.

So, what is the use of all of this information if it cannot be directly used by your team?

How do you communicate both the mission of enterprise and how it is doing while also speaking directly to the concerns that those who work there care most about?

In my experience, the answer is very simple…but not easy.

Teams I have been part of that received superior ratings on communication within their organization always had leaders who focused intently on Empathetic Communication.

Empathetic Communication: Talking about the things that your team cares about and can use

I define Empathetic Communication as a leader’s willingness to continuously learn and understand what is most important to their teams and their commitment to speaking to their teams about those things consistently.

It is a balance between communicating the direction and priorities of the organization while also speaking directly to the issues and concerns that are most important to the members of the team.

As the definition implies, this requires leaders to talk to their teams regularly, listen to their concerns and learn about the challenges they face in doing their jobs and achieving the goals the company demands of them.

Leaders can then use this understanding to design their communications to both address organizational priorities AND speak directly to the concerns and needs of their team.

Employing this type of communication allows leaders to consistently disseminate highly actionable and impactful information to their teams that directly addresses their concerns and challenges.

Organizations that are really good at this build it as a capability (and expectation) at every level of leadership, from CEO down to individual team leader.

This ensures that every team has an expedient way to communicate their issues and a quick feedback loop for redress.

It also develops leaders at the lowest levels to hone their communication skills as they grow into positions of greater breadth and responsibility.

The benefits produced by this approach are two-fold.

First, it increases the clarity and impact of information communicated.

Instead of flooding your team with voluminous information that they cannot directly apply, you are giving them clear and applicable guidance that can drive action and continuous improvement.

This is how communication drives improved results!

Second, it builds trust.

Being an empathetic communicator shows your team that they are being heard.

We have all been part of organizations where we felt we were on the receiving end of one way communication; a lot of being talked at rather than listened to.

Empathetic communication demonstrates that you have listened.

I requires you to stand in front of them and both talk about what they have told you is important to them and take accountability for addressing it.

This method of communication demonstrates there is a genuine partnership between you and your team members by consistently communicating both what YOU want to inform your team about as well as what your team WANTS to be consistently informed about.

This is how communication builds morale and culture!

Advertising TO your team instead of communicating WITH them: The arch enemy of Empathetic Communication

There are two elements that can make or break an organization’s attempt to employ empathetic communication.

1. Intent of your communication

2. Mode of your communication

Intent of communication

One of the biggest communication traps I have seen organizations fall into is related to intent.

Why do we communicate to our team?

Is it to sell them the company vision or to seek their input as to how to deliver that vision

In short, is your intent to advertise TO your team or communicate WITH them.

The former drives communication focused on leadership talking points unchallenged by the friction of team member pushback.

The latter promotes communication emphasizing company objectives while inviting the team to participate in the conversation as to how to deliver those objectives.

The first type of communication is static and insular, making leadership the only voice.

The second is dynamic and collaborative, giving all in the organization a voice in the ongoing conversation.

I don’t want to drop any bombshell spoilers here, but can you guess which of these lands best with teams?

Remember, your teams are NOT your customers, they are your teammates.

You are not trying to sell them on your product.

You are trying to engage them on the best way to create and improve that product.

Mode of communication

The intent with which you craft your communications plan tends to dictate the modes you utilize to convey it.

If your intent is to advertise TO your teams, you tend to choose impersonal means to do so.

Posters, virtual portals, wall mounted flatscreen slideshows and email campaigns driven by your marketing teams tend to be your chosen mediums.

If your intent is to communicate WITH your team, the mediums you utilize to do so tend to be more personal.

In person communication meetings, personal messages crafted by leaders to the team regularly and consistent in person feedback sessions with the team to discuss how things are going are the most common methods for this.

This is where I might ruffle some feathers.

If you want to positively impact communication within your organization, marketing cannot craft it like an impersonal ad campaign, leaders need to lead it with a personal touch.

I am not questioning the skills, abilities or necessity of marketing folks here.

They are amazingly skilled professionals who excel at managing brands and crafting messaging that directly contribute to the viability and success of every organization.

This skillset, however, is best employed for outward versus inward communication.

Marketing’s job is to communicate with customers.

It is a leader’s job to communicate with their team members.

It is the personal interactions that leaders have with their teams that enable them to understand the issues most important to employees and allows them to effectively communicate in a manner that speaks to them.

If you want to build empathetic communication as a skill, don’t outsource your internal communications to your marketing department.

Be a leader, make it personal and talk to your own team in your own voice.

Those are the building blocks to becoming an empathetic communicator.

Putting it all together

Communication is the most common complaint most employees have about the organizations they work for.

While we live in a time when communication modes are more numerous and speedy than they have ever been, organizations still struggle to effectively communicate to their teams in a way that will improve morale and performance.

Though information is more readily available, it’s clarity, meaning and applicability are often lost in its sheer volume and impersonal modes of communication (posters, digital content, flat screen displays instead of personal interaction and conversation).

Organizations that communicate effectively employ Empathetic Communication.

This type of communication creates a partnership between enterprise and team by conveying what is necessary for the organization to succeed while at the same time speaking directly to the issues, concerns and roadblocks most important to the team expected to drive that success.

That is how communication fuels improved morale and results.

For empathetic communication to take hold and bear fruit, leaders need take ownership of internal communication and not outsource it to their marketing departments (employ the efforts of those amazing professionals where they can do their best work….messaging outward to customers!).

Make it personal!

- Talk to your teams about what the organization is trying to achieve and why

- Tell them what is needed from them in order to achieve it

- Seek to learn what issues are most important to them

- Address those issues with them regularly to ensure they know that they are being heard and that these issues are being addressed.

Don’t use communication as a way to advertise TO your team, use it as an opportunity to communicate WITH them.

Your teammates will thank you (both verbally and through results 😊).

“Where did we go wrong here?”

Staring across a conference room table at one another, myself and several members of the operations and commercial team of our company were stumped at how a seemingly profitable opportunity was actually losing money for us by the time we made the product and shipped it to the customer.

After this question was posed, the usual blame game ensued.

The operations team complained that the requirements to manufacture the product were not accurately reflected in the price.

The estimating team complained that they did not get the right information from sales to make an accurate estimate

The sales team complained that they had limited time with the customer to get the necessary information and lacked the manufacturing expertise to ask every possible question.

After listening to this family squabble for a few minutes, I interjected by saying, “it sounds like we have a process gap here that we need to address”.

The response to this statement came at me like it had been drawn from a holster at high noon from members across each team:

“we have a process already that we have been following for years!”

A member of the estimating team walked me through the current process for order quoting for manufacture and the team had indeed followed the process to the letter.

The problem? The process did not work!

I listened attentively and at the end asked whether this process had generally been successful and this current situation was just an exception rather than a process problem.

After of a moment of silence and awkward side glances between team members, this same estimator said that what we were currently experiencing was indeed then norm rather than an exception.

When I then asked the team why would continue following a process that was not delivering the desired result, a member of the operations team gave a revealing, albeit disappointing, response.

He said, “we need to be disciplined to our processes”.

He was not necessarily wrong; the answer was just incomplete.

Process discipline is critical to establish consistency and continuously improve from there.

However, discipline to a process that continuously does not produce the desired result is not discipline, it is loyalty.

This particular team had stayed loyal to a process that consistently failed to deliver its intended result.

When it comes to processes, discipline and loyalty are NOT the same thing (and only one of them is a good thing).

Process Discipline reveals opportunities. Process Loyalty stifles them.

As someone whose process preaching to teams borders on zealotry, I am not here to downplay the critical importance of process discipline.

Where there is absence of consistent process, there is absence of consistent results.

So, if you do not have established processes for your work, you should establish some and be disciplined to them.

This, however, is where the process discipline versus process loyalty divide initiates.

Process discipline is the enabler for the Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDCA) cycle, so vaunted by Lean dorks (like me 😊).

Discipline to processes allows teams to successfully observe the consistent results that those processes produce, evaluate where gaps exist, modify the process to address those gaps and repeat that process continuously.

Process discipline allows for continuous analysis, refinement and improvement of processes in order to perpetually evolve them to deliver compounding results over time.

Loyalty to process is different.

Being loyal to a process is more about ego than improvement; more about stubbornness than discipline.

When teams are loyal to processes, they stick with them no matter what, even when they repeatedly fail to deliver the result that they were designed to produce.

This has the opposite effect of process discipline.

While process discipline spurs continuous learning and growth, process loyalty spurs accelerated stagnation and degradation of results.

Worse yet, it stagnates the growth of your team’s capability!

While process discipline promotes continuous learning and experimentation amongst your team members to improve processes and results, stubborn process loyalty promotes submission to processes as they are.

For leaders this should set off deafening alarm bells!

If we are promoting a culture of process loyalty, we are stunting the growth of our teams initiative, talents, knowledge and future potential……..all of which are things which we are paid to amplify, not to diminish!

Having processes is not an end unto itself, they are supposed to deliver desired results

A common cause of process loyalty is the pervasive idea that having processes is an end unto itself.

The creation of a process is often treated with finality rather than as a point of departure.

This is what leads to the mentality of “we already have a process for that” that took hold on the team in the opening anecdote.

It is the feeling that once the process is created, the job is done.

No analyzing whether it is actually delivering the desired results or identifying improvement opportunities to experiment with.

The only job once the process is designed is to follow it forever.

Whether this is caused by the ego of leaders who created the process, lack of trust in the team to experiment with the process, fear or lack of initiative instilled in the team making them hesitant to question the process or just plain laziness, it doesn’t matter……process loyalty is a warning sign that the culture of your team is one of stagnation and dependence, and that is on leaders to address.

Teach your teams that the creation of a process is just the first step in a continuous journey.

What follows is a continuous cycle of analyzing that process for opportunities to improve both ease of execution and results produced and empowering team members to experiment in order to improve both.

Be disciplined to the process you create, but not so loyal to it that you won’t allow it to evolve and maybe even die for the cause of continuous improvement.

Don’t perpetuate a culture of process loyalty, inspire a culture of process discipline instead!

When scrolling through the websites of businesses or the job boards for their open roles, I have noticed a particular selling point that many of them use to market the desirability of joining or doing business with their particular team.

You have probably seen it, or some derivative of it also.

While it is expressed in a diverse set of tag lines, it boils down to the same core concept……a “people centric culture”.

Now, this sounds absolutely awesome to me and I would advocate that people centric cultures are indeed what is needed to drive sustained success since, you know, it is the creativity, effort, judgement and diligence of PEOPLE that actually create results.

When I think of a people centric culture, the conceptual framework is to create the systems and support structures to enable people to achieve the clearly defined missions we are asking of them, allowing them the freedom to chase those targets utilizing the talents we hired them for in the first place and incentivizing those efforts with growth opportunities in both personal and career development as well as earning potential. Who would not want to be part of a team with that as their core culture?

There is, however, a problem. Most of the time, organizations are not truly serious about creating and fostering a culture like this, it is purely an ad campaign for recruiting of team members as well as a line to sell their potential customers (who would want to do business with a company boasting a “people crushing culture”?).

People tend to notice very quickly when the culture is not people centric, in either intent or deed, and no amount of lip service in communication meetings or visuals on posters or flat screens on the walls of your offices will make up for it.

In fact, attempting to do so only serves to breed a thick cynicism amongst the team that makes any future efforts to truly implement a people centric culture an uphill battle.

Are you “talking the talk” of a people centric culture in your formal processes?

Often times, I have found that when leaders are confronted with cynicism or negative perceptions by their teams regarding the organization living up to its ideals in practice, their first response is to defensively bristle at it.

“Don’t they realize all that we have done to try and make things better” or “that is an unfair perception” are some of the frequent comments I have heard in these types of situations.

Well, brace for the cold water because as leaders it is not our job to complain about the fairness of our team member’s perceptions or feedback on how things are going..........it is our job to understand what is CAUSING them to feel the way the do and ACT to change it!

I had a colleague from a past team talk to me recently about how she thought her current team was too cynical about leadership’s commitment to the vision they were preaching.

I asked her what part the team was most cynical about, and to paraphrase it was the idea that “our strength is in our great people”.

I chuckled a bit and asked why she thought the team was so cynical about that. She said she didn’t know, but did not think it was fair.

I then asked them the same questions I would ask any team in a similar situation (because I have been there many times before);

“How do you refer to people in your standard business processes (budgets, strat plans, CAPEX, etc.)?”

If the answer is “people”, “team members”, “teammates” or even “personnel”, yay you!

You are setting the tone for a people centric strategy and culture in your organization.

Unfortunately, in most businesses, as was indeed the case for my former colleague mentioned above, we don’t even “talk the talk” of being people centric (which does not bode well for the prospect of us “walking the talk” which we will get to 😊).

Peruse the minutes of board, executive and mid level budget sessions, strategy meetings or 3 to 5 year strategic plans and any mention of people is usually expressed in cold, dehumanizing language.

Words like “heads” or “headcount” are the most popular references to “people” in most formal company processes.

If these are the words used in your organization’s standard processes, I can put my finger on the initial source of cynicism amongst your team as to why your “people centric culture” posters are not worth the paper they are printed on.

In laying this out for my colleague, I explained to her that you can’t on the one hand advertise the idea that people are your biggest priority, while at the same time linguistically dehumanize them in your processes. Think about the duality of that message.

If you think that this type of terminology is benign and do not think it dehumanizing or uninspiring to those you lead, why not use it in your advertising for new recruits and customers?

“Our strength is in our great headcount”, or “Our greatest resource is our headcount”

Doesn’t have quite the same ring to it huh?

Not really the inspiring message that would bring new customers or recruits into your company’s orbit.

Well if that language is not good enough to advertise to the outside world with, why would you use it to communicate with the people on your team?

If your most important resource is your people, your first step to proving that true is to refer to them as people.

Why does this matter? Language drives action; consistent action creates culture.

The language we use colors the actions we take, hence the term “walking the talk”.

The language of our values, mission and strategy are what we should be looking to see emulated in the behaviors and actions of our teams right?

So what does non “people centric” language drive? Non “people centric” action.

Don’t believe me? Think about how language impacts our reaction when hit with the unexpected?

In times of low demand or market shift, when discussing the need to cut cost, does your organization utilize a graduated playbook focused on reduction of all non-people position expenses first (supplies, raw material, CAPEX deferral, non essential Maintenance spend referral, pricing review, etc), or do you knee jerk-edly skip to “headcount reduction”?

When we talk about the need for “productivity improvement” (a term rife with loose definitions and implied slander on our team members’ work ethic) do we talk about the process improvement needed from the top down, up and down the value stream, to drive better flow and better profit? Or do we talk about “headcount reduction” as the primary path to efficiency.

I have personally witnessed this knee jerk callousness multiple times in my career (some of which I have led, regrettably).

Instances where we have skipped over a cornucopia of savings potential through process alignment, discipline and improvement throughout the organization to lazily focus on the expedient avenue of personnel reduction.

For a “people centric” culture, we seem really gung ho on the strategy of constantly getting rid of people. Our language is a big reason why!

Now consider these same situations, but instead of utilizing “headcount” or “heads” in our corporate process speak, we used the term “team member” or “teammate”.

You are talking about the same PEOPLE, just in humanizing language.

Now substitute those words into those same scenarios:

1) In times of low demand, would you immediately skip to “teammate reduction” as the first cost reduction remedy or would you be more inclined to look for expense reduction that minimized the impact on your teammates?

2) As part of strategic productivity improvement, would your first stated goal be “reduction in teammates” or would it be to focus on the processes that enabled “team members” to generate more profit by enabling them to create more value with the same, or less, amount of effort?

This is not to say that reduction in team members is never the answer, sometimes it is.

However, if you claim to have a “people centric” culture, why would you prematurely jump to that action if it is not.

Some people have actually told me in conversation that using this type of language “makes it harder to decide to cut people”.

To which I say “good, that is the point”. Thinking of people as, you know, people instead of “heads” makes it harder to jump to personnel reduction as a course of action without first thinking through other options.

In cases where it is the answer, it still should be a tough experience.

In a “people centric culture”, shouldn’t it hurt a little to cut a teammate?

Putting it all together

Building and leading a people centric culture is indeed a worthy and noble goal. History tells us again and again that it is truly the only way to build consistent and lasting results rather than continuously stumbling into random success or failure (and you will never hear from a more passionate advocate for it than me).

Achieving this goal, however, requires a true, good faith effort, from top to bottom, to lead your organization with people’s empowerment, growth and professional and personal well being in mind.

This effort includes crafting your leadership culture and the language it uses to drive action in a manner that prioritizes enabling those things. Word and deed from leadership must consistently match the intent of being “people centric”.

Your team is watching every day to see if you are acting in accordance with your intention to live and enable this type of culture. Paying lip service to it without leading in the manner that will build and sustain it is not only going to drive (deserved) cynicism amongst your team, but will eventually result in an inability to retain and recruit the best teammates (which in turn will destroy your ability to achieve the results you are seeking).

To create a culture, language and action by leaders is what matters folks (not what it says on your promotional posters); your teams hear it, see it and remember it. Before you blame them for being cynical about it, check your language and actions……you may discover why.

“People Centric Culture”, it is a popular concept (and it should be!), but if led poorly it can drive more cynicism than results.

Often times we pay lip service to this idea for recruiting or advertising purposes, while at the same time the language we routinely use in our business level processes drives us to lead and act in ways that are not at all “people centric”.

Language drives action, consistent action creates culture.

Want to know if your culture is being led to be “people centric”….watch your language!

We were behind.

A team that I was a part of was working on a critical project for our organization and had hit some snags.

Several months into the initiative we discovered that many of the assumptions we had made at the outset were incorrect.

This presented some unanticipated roadblocks that we needed to overcome.

Our project leader was rightfully nervous and was looking to increase our speed of progress.

When I walked her through where we were, what was standing in our way and the support and time I thought would be needed to get us back on track, she retorted with the following infuriating remark:

“This team is going to have to demonstrate more urgency Sean, leadership is not going to like this”.

And just like that, the entire team, myself included, disengaged and shut down.

It had nothing to do with the idea that urgency was needed to get back on track, we knew that, it was the accusatory name dropping as the means of coercing that urgency that insulted the team and made the project leader look small and insecure.

English writer Samual Johnson once said that:

“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”

In the context of leading teams, I would say that:

“name dropping for the purpose of driving urgency is the last refuge of a weak leader.”

Doing this makes leaders look small and pathetic for the following reasons.

- This approach tries to inspire urgency through fear and threats rather than leadership.

- By dropping other peoples names as part of the threat (or even worse, wrapping names up in nebulous terms like “leadership”), so called leaders are showing that they are unwilling to even own the threat themselves, they are outsourcing it to others! If you are going to drop a name, make it your own and own the threat!

- the approach of dropping names to inspire urgency shows that the leader has no interest in why the team is struggling to deliver the goal and has no intention of actually supporting their efforts to do so.

If you are a leader that employs this tactic, understand that while it might make you feel big in the moment, it makes you look small in the eyes of your team, slows their progress towards your goals and sends the culture of the overall group straight on through to toxic town.

I wish this type of leadership was a rare occurrence, but twenty four years of working on teams has shown me that it is very common and agnostic of industry.

Fear and threats never inspire urgency in talented people, they inspire disfunction and attrition.

So how DO you inspire greater urgency and speed without resorting to annoying name dropping?

If you truly want to inspire increased urgency on your team, don’t drop names…focus on understanding the roadblocks and actually offer support!

Now there is definitely need for accountability on teams to deliver on their commitments, but this is far more effectively inspired through leadership than coerced via threat.

When teams require greater speed of progress in order to hit deadlines, rather than dropping the names of higher ups to cause fear try understanding the gaps where support is needed and try to provide it! (You know, like a leader would 😊).

Identify the areas where you could augment your team’s efforts or take something less critical off their plates to free up more of their time to focus on this goal.

In short, be in it with them and move impediments to their success out of the way.

What does this approach do?

- Inspires confidence because the leader is actively solving problems and removing roadblocks.

- Builds trust because the team’s concerns are being heard and responded to.

- Builds cohesion by focusing all of the team’s efforts on identifying solutions to the problem at hand rather than threatening punishment for the problem existing.

All of the above add up to more engaged teams, greater results and more respected leaders.

Now, if this genuine effort is made and team members are not meeting commitments due to performance issues then accountability or reassignment may be necessary.

If you have not made this effort, however, you have not done your part to enable your team to be successful in the first place.

Putting it all together

Shameless or nebulous name dropping as a method to increasing your team’s urgency is a surefire way to make your team see you as a small and insecure leader (so basically, not a leader at all).

Dropping vomit inducing gems like “leadership is not going to like this” or “such and such vice president is going to be very upset” to inspire your team to improve their performance does nothing but increase toxicity, incite attrition and make you look like you don’t belong in a leadership position (which, if you employ this tactic regularly….you don’t).

The best way to inspire increased results on a struggling team is to work WITH them to understand the obstacles standing in their way and provide the support that enables them to overcome those things.

Leadership is about support and inspiration, not coercion or threats.

Be in the thick of the effort with them, not threatening them with punishment from the outside.

This is the approach that fuels trust, builds morale and drives results.

Dropping names like an insecure jerk just pisses people off.

There we were, the staff of a manufacturing plant, staring at one another in disbelief in our second floor conference room overlooking the shop floor as we read through the feedback provided from our annual employee survey.

Most who have worked in the corporate world for any amount of time are familiar with this process.

Once a year, employees are provided with the opportunity to rate their company and its leadership on everything from their commitment to safety and providing employees the right tools to do their job to the commitment and care they show towards their employees’ personal and professional growth.

Leaders, on the flip side, are often treated to a reckoning on their failure to perform and provide in the eyes of their employees.

They are often brutal, and rightfully so, as they are supposed to serve as spurs to drive leaders to change behaviors or systems in a manner that will benefit those who work for them (and by proxy, the results of the organization that they are the stewards of).

If received in that spirit, these kinds of surveys provide leaders with a great opportunity to learn what is most important to their teams and how well they perceive their leadership’s performance to these things so that they can better address them moving forward.

Unfortunately, that is not how most leaders treat these opportunities and it is certainly not the way the team mentioned above that I was a part of did on the day in question.

The feedback provided by our employees was, to say the least, humbling.

They raked us over the coals for everything from not being committed to employee safety to not caring about their feedback or ideas.

I looked around the room at all of the horrified faces of the managers and supervisors as they sat in silence, stunned by what they were hearing.

Once people began to break the silence, their responses closely resembled 5 of the 7 stages of grief (we skipped the productive stages of testing and acceptance😊):

1. Shock: “Where is all of this coming from”?

2. Denial: “They can’t be talking about us, they must be talking about higher level corporate leadership”

3. Anger: “That is not fair, don’t they realize how much we have done to address that?!”

4. Bargaining: “Maybe if we provided some free lunches, feedback would improve?”

5. Depression: “What’s the point of all of our efforts, nothing is ever good enough for these people!”.

After listening to this for a while, the environmental health and safety (EH&S) manager and I shared a disappointed glance and he then chimed in with an interjection that I will never forget.

He said, “guys, it does not matter if you think the feedback is fair. The perception is what it is. Our job is to try to understand what is causing it so we can change it”

This hit the team like cold water to the face.

What he was telling us to do was to get over ourselves and what we think our team’s perceptions SHOULD be and instead focus on what they are and try and understand why so that we can, you know, actually do something to change them.

Don’t try to litigate the perceptions of your team……understand what is causing them so you can change them!

Every organization bloviates about wanting open and transparent feedback from their teams, but do they really?

I am sure many of you have seen scenarios like the type described above play out on teams you have been a part of.

Team feedback is requested through some formal cadenced process and when it is received, leaders refuse to accept it (unless it is positive).

When feedback is sought, all too often leadership attempts to litigate the merits of negative feedback they receive rather than seeking to understand what is driving it.

They dismiss perceptions that they feel should not exist and not only fail to address those perceptions but perpetuate them!

The reason why there is skepticism regarding these pleas for feedback, whether they be through employee surveys, team sensing sessions, round tables or focus groups, is that oftentimes nothing ever changes as they result of them.

This arrogant leadership focus on litigation instead of an earnest attempt to understand is why!

The tragic part is that transparent negative feedback and constructive criticism are a gift.

They reveal gaps or improvement opportunities in your methods as well as perceptions (whether true or driven by misunderstanding) that you can address and change for the better.

If leaders actually took the time to truly understand WHY their team felt negatively toward a certain element of the organization, they could create a blueprint to address it.

Bottom line, team perceptions are leadership business.

If the team is indicating that they have negative feelings towards any part of the business, organization or environment, it is the responsibility of leadership to understand why and make the necessary changes to shift perceptions in a positive direction……whether you think they are fair or not.

It doesn’t matter if they are fair…..they are what they are and the responsibility to address them is on leadership (that’s why you get paid the big bucks😊).

Putting it all together

Negative feedback and constructive criticism are a gift if handled well by leaders.

If leaders receive indicators that their teams have negative perceptions towards elements of the environment that they work in, it is an opportunity to engage their teammates and understand why they feel that way and what would be needed to correct it.

Doing so builds trust, restores faith and improves morale and results.

Too often, however, the initial reflex of leaders is to litigate the merits of the feedback they receive through their own lens and dismiss those perceptions they feel are unfair (usually to them or their methods).

This approach destroys trust, perpetuates toxic morale and tanks results.

When you get negative feedback, share it with the team and seek their feedback as to how to address it and work with them to make the necessary changes.

Otherwise, do not ask for the feedback.

When it comes to team feedback and team perception, don’t litigate…..lead!

If there is one thing that supercharges performance and gets the best out of people and teams, it is competition.

Competing against other people as an individual or as part of a team drives us to excel in ways that few other ventures can.

It pushes us to expend discretionary effort as well as endure more hardship and increase our skillsets more than we otherwise would, which usually translates into superior results (in addition to more fun in the work that is put in to get there).

It is no wonder then that leaders often look to instill a spirit of productive competition between the internal players on their teams in order to harness the energy and growth that this can produce.

For example:

- An army platoon spurring on physical competition between soldiers during training in order to maximize the fitness of the unit.

- A manufacturing operation promoting competition between shifts or departments on productivity or reduction of defects or elimination of waste in their processes.

- A sales operation promoting competition amongst teams to maximize incoming sales pipelines or improve profitability of new business in order to maximize bottom line revenue for their companies.

Promotion of this type of competition can increase the effectiveness of the collective team, inspire greater individual growth among individual team members and build strong relationships and pride across organizations.

I have employed this often in my past as an operations leader.

In a plant that I managed, I would set up productivity related goals for each shift to be measured on, and every month the highest scoring shift would receive “the belt” (an MMA style championship belt constructed from chain that we manufactured at the facility) during the monthly employee meeting.

During this time, the winning shift selected a member from their team to come up front and have the belt put around their waste by the plant manager and their picture would go up on the wall for the next month to remind all shifts who won.

The result?

Higher productivity across the board, greater pride and cohesion amongst shift teams, better relationships between shifts and increased communication from each shift on issues preventing them from maximizing their productivity and winning the belt (a goldmine for problem solving and continuous improvement activity!).

This is the positive impact that productive competition can have on at team.

The toxic culture spurred by unproductive internal rivalry

However, this phenomenon also has a dark side.

Productive competition has an evil cousin that will take hold if leaders are not thoughtful about applying the concept of competition amongst their teams, unproductive rivalry.

In the competition scenario discussed earlier, this could take the form of the competing shifts developing adversarial relationships because they feel that their competitors are getting unfair advantages (differing mix of products run on different shifts skewing the results as an example) or even actively working against their teammates (not putting tools away, withholding information at shift change to tip the scales in their favor, etc.).

In terms of internal competition situations, unproductive rivalry transforms an exercise meant to improve team results and bolster team cohesion into a process that destroys both.

In a general sense, unproductive rivalry can manifest itself in a different way; key players or departments actively working at odds with or against one another in their daily work.

You have probably seen it within your own organization or one that you have worked for in the past.

- Quality and operations teams sparring over acceptable specs, with both sides offering problems but no solutions or willingness to compromise.

- Sales and finance teams arguing over pricing/costing standards and actively undermining one another whenever the opportunity presents itself at the detriment of the business.

- Leadership teams that act aligned when they are together in meetings to get along but undermine one another in their daily work.

The list goes on and on.

All of these situations are examples of unproductive rivalry and all of them eventually destroy the team (whether acutely through implosion or chronically through prolonged under performance).

I have heard leaders (bad ones 😊) dismissively and incorrectly shrug things like this off with phrases like “healthy tension between departments” or “holding peers accountable”.

Those two phrases are indeed positive when applied properly.

“Healthy tension between departments” just means that different departments will see things from different angles that will cause them to challenge one another.

“Holding peers accountable” means that we teams hold one another accountable to the standards and processes of the organization.

Both of those things are great as long as the overall expectation is for team members to work together toward organizational objectives and to find solutions when these things come up.

When, on the other hand, teams dig in on their positions and refuse to work together on solutions because an unproductive rivalry has developed, tolerating or dismissing it is poor leadership, plain and simple.

When department rivalry becomes a leadership failure

There is no easy way to say this and no easy way for leaders to hear it.

Unproductive rivalry becomes a pure and unadulterated leadership failure when it is tolerated, promoted or just not noticed.

Leaders that see competition between departments or players becoming toxic rather than productive and do not adjust the approach in order rectify it have failed their teams.

Leaders that see rivalries developing between departments or key players and either tolerate it, promote it or dismiss it as “healthy tension”, have failed their teams.

Leaders that remain aloof to the fact that these things are even happening in their organizations have definitely failed their teams (in leadership, more than any other situation, ignorance is no excuse).

Leaders need to be adept at inspiring productive competition on their teams to drive increased cohesion and results while being attuned to whether unproductive rivalries exist or are developing.

In short, unproductive rivalry on any team is the leader’s fault and it is always on us to fix it….it will never fix itself.

Putting it all together

Building a spirit of productive competition in an organization is an incredible service that a good leader can provide their team.

It drives increased cohesion between team members, improved results and more fun in the efforts the team puts forth in order to achieve goals.

However, productive competition has an ugly cousin called unproductive rivalry.

This latter condition is the disservice that bad leaders curse their teams with and the former can easily become the latter if leaders are not careful.

Whether it be departmental competition becoming toxic, departments working against or at odds with one another or leaders within the organization agreeing in public but undermining one another in practice, it is leadership business to see it and correct it.

If it is tolerated, promoted or not noticed in an organization, that is a leadership failure and one that will eventually destroy the collective team (whether through acute implosion or chronic underperformance).

Leaders need to be adept at inspiring healthy competition on their teams while simultaneously being attuned to the existence or development of unproductive rivalries and act decisively when they see them.

“This all sounds great Sean, but who is going to make sure that people follow this process every day?”

This smug question immediately raised my blood pressure and made me want to lash out at the leader who spouted it to me (which is rare for me….I’m a pretty chill guy by nature 😊).

At the time I was working as a continuous improvement leader charged with deploying an aligned lean operating system across a global organization with a heavy focus on visual daily management.

On the day of this snarky question, I was working with a team in the UK on the conduct and benefit of a tiered daily communication process between teams, from the shop floor up through plant leadership, utilizing visual boards and escalation tools.

It was while I was teaching the plant’s top leadership (the plant manager and his staff) that the question above was sharply posed to me.

I initially tried to give the staff member who posed the question an opportunity to clarify himself by asking him what he meant.

He responded by saying that the benefits of this process were exciting but once it was in place, leaders would be too busy to “hold people’s hands” every day to make sure they were following the process.

Remember how I said I was a chill guy by nature?

While this is true 90% of the time, this moment was a reminder to me that there is one particular thing in a working environment that sends me into orbit immediately……entitled leaders!

Leaders that are asking for commitments and results from others that they are not willing to give themselves just naturally set me off.

My response was sharp.

I simply asked him, “I believe I am looking at the leadership team for this entire factory correct?”, he nodded.

I then said, “good, well that means you will be making sure the team understands and follows the process, because you are going to be going through it right alongside them every day”.

“What if I’m too busy?”, this staff member snorted.

At this point I looked at the plant manager while I responded.

The response was purposefully cold.

I simply said, “don’t be. You are asking your team to make a daily commitment, you need to make the same one”.

While this particular incident was related to lean implementation in a manufacturing plant, the symptom displayed during this exchange is universal and a common killer of productive cultures on teams of all stripes.

There are very few things that disengage people faster, dilute results more or eat away at team morale more extremely than the one-way commitment fallacy.

The one-way commitment fallacy, the nascent culture killer

The one- way commitment fallacy is the belief that leaders can expect people to consistently commit to rituals, behaviors, focuses or disciplines that they dictate without committing to those same things themselves.

You have likely seen this fallacy in action in your professional life.

- The leader who demands cost cutting on the team while they or their leadership teams spend frivolously

- The leader who demands discipline to process in some areas while allowing other areas (or themselves) to have no process discipline

- The leader who demands that people “take ownership” of their work and results while taking no such ownership themselves

- The leader who demands participation in regular rituals (meetings, training, evaluations) while not participating in those rituals themselves

- The leader who demands their team model specific behaviors while not modeling these behaviors themselves

- …..and many more

What does this fallacy do to the culture of a team?

If you ever have ever been a worker on team where it is prevalent, you already know the answer………it kills it!

The lack of commitment from leaders creates a lack of commitment from the team.

The team may well live up to their commitments just enough to avoid getting in trouble, but the tell tale signs of an uncommitted team or toxic culture will stand out to any leader self aware enough to look.

- Initiatives will not stick

- Results will stagnate, degrade or at a bare minimum be inconsistent

- Teams will be dis-functional, people and departments working against each other or not working together at all

- Communication will be guarded, lack transparency or barely exist at all

- Cynicism will be rampant across the team about any initiative or change

- Turnover will be high, attracting new team members will be a struggle

- Posters and graphics on your walls advocating behaviors and values that define your team will be hollow, meaningless monuments to failure

Why does this fallacy kill high performing cultures?

The reason that the impacts are so dramatic is that the reaction to this fallacy by those working under it is visceral and deep.

It represents the classic:

“Do as I say, not as I do”

Or

“Because I said so”

We humans are naturally wired to detest and resist those sentiments, so we do.

This is not to say that your people should not be held accountable to commitments, they absolutely must be!

However, if you are going to expect commitment from your team, you have to be equally (if not even more) committed to and hold yourself accountable to those same things if you truly want results.

How to avoid this problem

Like most conundrums in leadership, avoiding this fallacy is not complicated but it is also not easy.

For a leader to avoid falling into this trap they must first examine the core commitments they have asked their teams to make and ask one simple question of themselves, “am I and my leadership team making the same commitments?”.

Examples:

- If I am asking that the team to commit to implementing a business system change (Lean/Six Sigma, EOS, Agile, OPEX, etc), am I and my leaders setting the example of learning and living that system ourselves?

- If I am asking that my team model values and behavior that I claim define the organization or team, am I and my leaders living that example?

- If I am asking my team to commit to a certain focus (profit, cost savings, quality, upskilling, collaboration, etc), am I and my leaders equally and demonstrably committed to the same focus at our level?

- If I am asking the team to commit to certain rituals or disciplines (daily management walks, meeting attendance, training attendance, etc) am I and my leaders equally and visibly committed to those same rituals.

- If I am asking my team to commit to process discipline in their work, am I and my leaders equally committed to process discipline in ours?

If the answer to any of these questions is no, you have immediate areas that you can focus on to begin to reverse course and demonstrate the type of two-way commitment that builds electric team culture.

When people see their leaders sharing equally in commitment and hardship rather than just demanding it, they respond positively (no matter the venture or type of team) which translates directly to positive results.

Again, this is not complicated, but also not easy.

This requires a combination of the self-awareness and humility needed to accept that you are failing to commit to what you have asked of others and the courage to hold yourself and every leader in your organization accountable to reverse course and make those commitments.

Putting it all together

The one-way commitment fallacy is the belief that leaders can expect people to consistently commit to rituals, behaviors, focuses or disciplines that they dictate without committing to those same things themselves.

It is an insidious killer of potentially high performing team cultures because it creates the impression that leaders do not care about their people and are not holding themselves to the same standard as those they employ.

A high performing culture needs two-way commitment where leaders actively prove that they are just as committed to the focuses, rituals, disciplines and sacrifices that they are asking of their team.

When people see their leaders sharing equally in commitments and hardships rather than just demanding them, they will always respond positively which will drive higher performance from the overall team.

To determine whether you and your leadership team are demonstrating the needed two-way commitment to build this type of culture, define the core focuses you are asking of your organization and determine for each whether there is equal commitment to these focuses by you and your leadership team.

If the answer is no on any count, you have the areas to start focusing on to turn things around and get your organization’s culture back on the road to high performance.

When one hears, reads or talks about leadership, whether it be in a board room, on a shop floor, a ball field or on a battlefield, the most frequently celebrated leadership styles tend to be those that put the leader front and center.

The turnaround leader that takes a team from one that is not performing well to one that excels.

The crisis leader that leads their team through desperate situations to achieve desired outcomes.

The transformational leader that leads their team through an identity or business model shift (implementing lean or opex as an operating system in a company as an example) in order to improve or stay relevant over time.

The visionary leader who builds their team from the ground up in pursuit of a specific cause, mission or vision.

However, there is a trickier, more subtle, type of leadership position that many will find themselves in during their careers but is talked about a lot less: The Rock Star leader.

Unlike the other leadership styles listed above this type of leadership is far less “front and center” but is instead more in the background.

Rock Star leadership does not mean the leader is a rock star, it means that the teams they are leading are rock stars.

This term does not apply to teams that merely think they are rock stars (many teams that do not deserve that title claim it), it applies only to teams that have measurably proven their rock star status through consistent performance.

When taking on a leadership position, many leaders instinctively look to change the way things are done in order to improve results.

They are encouraged by their superiors (as well as their egos) to “put their stamp” on the team or the operation or to “drive change” (or my least favorite…”be a change agent”…I am not sure how many leaders know that this term makes their teams want to barf, just know that it does 😊) to improve things.

This guidance works pretty well and is often necessary in turnaround, transformation and crisis leadership scenarios, but what about situations where the team is already performing really well?

How do you think a team that is populated with high performers and performing well will react to a new leader looking to “put their stamp” on it or claiming to be coming in as a change agent (again, if you take anything away from this work, let it be this: stop using that term, your team throws up in their mouths a little every time you say it, seriously 😊)?

If you have ever been a member of a team like this and have had a leader who tried this approach, you already know the answer…….NOT WELL!

High performing teams were already rock stars before you came on board, why do you want to change them?

This is not to say that they do not need leadership, they absolutely do, but what they need from their leaders is different than what a struggling team needs and we rarely arm leaders with the tools and guidance needed to give it to them.

What does a team of rock stars need from their leader?

In contrast to teams that are struggling, rock stars are not looking for leaders to provide change, they are looking for leaders to provide amplification.

Amplification of team capabilities

Amplification of team results

Amplification of combined team effectiveness

They are not looking for you to change them, there is no reason to as they are already performing at a high level.

They are looking for you to provide the environment, means and guidance that allows them to amplify the talent they already bring to the table, build upon it further and increase the impact that talent has on the results of the collective team.

They already rock, they want a leader to help them rock harder, louder and faster.

How do leaders provide this amplification?

The popular guidance of “putting your stamp” on the work of your team does not apply when leading a team of rock stars.

Trying to assert your identity or style of work into a team that is already performing at a high level might make them worse (at bare minimum it will make them resentful).

Why would you do that?

Don’t risk letting your ego turn The Rolling Stones into a damn garage band.

Instead, look to amplify what they already do well and enable them to take those things to the next level in order to grow their capabilities and the collective team’s results.

The exact methods of doing this might differ depending on the type of team you are leading, but some common areas of focus for rock star leaders are:

- Ensuring guidance (goals, targets, how team members contribute) is crystal clear and highly focused.

- Ensuring that the systems and processes the team is working within are designed to enable them to maximize their collective talents.

- Getting to know the career growth goals of their team members and shepherding them through the processes of increasing their capabilities in order to meet them.

- Identifying additional opportunities for their teams to use their talents to improve results even more.

Leadership focuses like these amplify the teams collective talents by guiding and enabling them in a way that maximizes results and allows them to continuously grow.

Think of it this way. As the leader of a rock star team, your role is not to be the front man of the band, but rather to be the roadie.

The roadie for a rock band does not play the music.

Instead, they set up the gear, coordinate the logistics and ensure that the sound, light and pyrotechnic systems are all set up to maximize the bands performance.

When you are leading rock stars, you are the roadie.

You set up and foster the environment that amplifies the team’s talent and maximizes their ability to rock!

Putting it all together

Leadership is not a one-dimensional, one size fits all skill.

The type of leadership needed to maximize results will depend on the ability and type of team being led.

When leading a struggling team, a very direct and disruptive approach may be necessary in order to change the trajectory of results to needed levels.

However, when leading a team of consistently high performers already driving strong results, this type of leadership will likely make the team perform worse.

Leading rock stars requires leaders to modify their approach to focus on amplification rather than change.

The team already rocks, why would you want to change them?

What you want to do is amplify them:

Amplify team capabilities

Amplify team results

Amplify combined team effectiveness

While there are many ways to do this depending on what type of team you are leading, some common leadership focal points that amplify rocks star teams are:

- Ensuring guidance (goals, targets, how team members contribute) is crystal clear and highly focused.

- Ensuring that the systems and processes the team is working within are designed to enable them to maximize their collective talents.

- Getting to know the career growth goals of their team members and shepherding them through the processes of increasing their capabilities in order to meet them.

- Identifying additional opportunities for their teams to use their talents to improve results even more.

When leading a rock star team, your role as a leader is not to be the front man, your role is the be the roadie!

You set the team up to rock as hard as they can by setting up and sustaining the environment that allows them to do so.

You want to lead a group of rockstars well, stop trying to be the front man.

Grab the gear, check the systems and set your team up to rock…….be the roadie!

It is undeniable that the biggest differentiator between teams in similar fields is culture.

Culture is what determines a team’s focus, alignment, speed, resilience and continuous improvement potential.

Teams with a strong culture excel at these things, regardless of circumstances.

Teams who have not put the work in to build a strong culture either stagnate in stable times or collapse in the face of adversity or competition.

For these reasons, the importance of investing the necessary energy, resources and consistency into building the right culture on your team cannot be overstated.

If you are the leader of a team that recognizes this, bravo! You are in the minority.

If you are the leader of a team that both recognizes this and has established the systems and mechanisms to deploy these efforts to the desired effect of building and sustaining a strong team culture, double bravo! You are officially in the uncommon amongst uncommon category of organizations.

Even teams who truly understand the need for investment in organizational culture struggle to successfully build it to a point where it takes hold and sticks.

From my time both being part of and leading teams, the steps necessary to do this are relatively straight forward, it is the understanding of who owns what step and how to support those who do that usually trips organizations up.

The high-level steps to building and sustaining a strong culture on a team are:

1. Definition

2. Resourcing

3. Deploying

4. Refining

The first two steps are the responsibility of top leadership.

The first step in building the right culture for your organization is to define the attributes that best comprise that culture (which may differ depending on the purpose of your organization).

This requires leaders to put the necessary time and thought into crafting what their desired culture is and what behaviors are needed from their teams in order to realize it.

For example, if you lead an organization that requires continuous innovation in order to stay ahead of the competition, you would likely desire your team’s base culture to be one of curiosity and continuous experimentation.

For this culture to take hold, leaders would need to establish this behavior as an expectation (for everyone, from the CEO to the line worker) and ensure that the organizational systems, processes and incentives enable this behavior to thrive (you cannot expect your team to behave in a way that is not supported by your systems and not rewarded by your incentive programs).

The second step is resourcing.

Leaders need to define the personnel, time and funding to build their culture.

They need to consider things such as training needed, additional personnel needed to lead and sustain this culture as well additional resources required to do so.

These first two steps are 100% owned and owed by top leadership.

Leaders at the top of the organization control the purse strings and need to be able to articulate and set the example for the behaviors they want to take hold as the team’s base culture.

However, your culture will be doomed to be nothing more than hollow words on the walls of your organization without steps 3 and 4.

These are the implementation and sustainment steps that top leadership are incapable of doing alone.

Step 3, deployment, is the process of articulating the value of your desired culture to the team you want to adopt it, what the behaviors you are expecting look like in practice (at every level and in every role in the organization) and continuously coaching, mentoring and incentivizing the team to adopt these behaviors.

Step 4, refining, is establishing the feedback loop that enables the team at large to provide input into ways in which the culture you desire could better thrive and enables leaders to consistently act on that feedback to keep the team’s culture vibrant and consistently growing and improving.

Steps 3 and 4 require a strong partnership between top leadership, front line leadership and the team at large.

The most powerful partnership in getting any culture change venture underway is between top leadership and frontline leadership.

‘

Font-line leaders; your team culture building foremen and forewomen

Why are front line leaders so important in culture change efforts?

It’s pretty simple really, they lead and interact with more people on a daily basis than top leadership every will!

In a manufacturing operation, most team leaders will directly interact with and lead more people on a daily basis than their CEO.

In a military organization, most platoon level Non Commissioned Officers (NCO’s) will directly interact with and lead more people than the Commanding General each day.

In short, your front-line leaders are the ones really leading your people every day and your people will take their cues on behavior and culture from them.

They have the daily conversations about working through situations and problems that occur on the ground.

They serve as sounding boards for their team’s input and ideas.

They help their teams with personal issues they are struggling with.

They earn the trust of their teams every day.

Make no mistake, top leaders are critical to the efforts of building culture through their clear articulation of what right looks like and serving as examples of it through their own behavior.

However, without equipping and empowering your front-line leaders to do these things at their level, you are wasting your time. The culture you want to build will die on the vine.

Your front-line leaders are your purveyors of culture; they are your culture foreman and forewomen.

Failing to train, inform, seek input from and empower your front-line leaders to lead your culture building efforts on the ground is an inexcusable failure of leadership at the top and will doom any such efforts to being token (at best).

What your foremen and forewomen need from top leadership

So how do top leaders best support their culture foremen and forewomen in these efforts?

The answer to this question is three-fold.

First, do the necessary work on steps 1 and 2 of the process of building and sustaining culture.

Ensure that you have truly defined:

- the cultural behaviors you are looking to instill

- why they are important to team success

- set them as expectations for all leaders to mirror (from top leader on down)

- ensure that your current systems, processes and incentive structures promote and enable these behaviors

- ensure that the efforts to deploy them are properly resourced for success

Second, put the necessary time and energy into training your front-line leaders on what these behaviors look like in daily work (at every level and every role, to include your own) and how to work with their teams in order to instill them.

And third, seek their feedback as to how best to deploy this culture across the teams (they know their teams better than you ever will….get comfortable with that), how the current deployment efforts are going and how they can be improved.

Putting forth all three efforts for your front-line leaders as much as is needed by you and your extended top leadership team will equip and empower your team culture foreman and forewomen to successfully lead and sustain the culture you are looking to build.

Failure to do so will doom any culture building endeavor you have dreamed up to nothing more than a token, empty aspiration with no actual traction.

No matter how charismatic or inspirational your top leadership is, culture is forged on the front lines and requires resourced and empowered foreman and forewomen to lead it from the front.

Putting it all together

A strong team culture is the ultimate competitive edge, no matter what type of work your team is doing.

Building culture on a team is not about words on a poster or a power point slide, it is about rallying a group of people around a vision and a standard.

The four steps needed to build a strong culture on any team are:

1. Definition

2. Resourcing

3. Deployment

4. Refinement

Top leadership owns and owes steps 1 and 2, but steps 3 and 4 require a close partnership between top level leadership and front-line leadership.

Front-line leaders interact with and directly lead more people on a daily basis than top level leaders ever will.

These front-line leaders are your team culture foremen and forewomen who will need to be the purveyors of any culture you are trying to build in your organization.

Otherwise, any effort you try to drive from the top will be doomed from the start.

To support these front-line leaders, top level leaders need to:

1. Take the time to execute steps 1 and 2 of the model laid out earlier (Definition and Resourcing) well.

2. Take the necessary time, energy and resources to train your front-line leaders on the culture you are trying to build and their role in building it (and empower them to go do it!).

3. Seek out their feedback on how best to deploy this culture to their teams, how the current deployment is going and how it could be improved.

Doing these things equips your front-line leaders to be the foremen and forewomen they need to be in the effort to build a strong and competition shattering team culture across your organization.

Failing to do so dooms your organization to being one of the shattered competitors of organizations who do.

I was splashed in the face with the cold water of this phrase as a production supervisor in my early years in manufacturing.

I noticed that a team member of mine was clearly frustrated while working at his machine.

He was staring at the job order he was working on, shaking his head and wildly gesturing with his hands in bewilderment.

I walked over and put a hand on his shoulder and said, “talk to me bud, what’s up?”.

He then dropped his head, sighed and told me:

“there’s no point Sean. It’s nothing you can do anything about. It’s a floor problem, not a carpet problem so no one is going to care”.

I had not heard this phrase before so I had him educate me on its meaning; a meaning I recognized instantly and have seen in practice on many teams since.

This phrase manifests itself in different forms on different teams:

“floor versus office”

“rank and file versus leadership”

“company versus corporate”

“labor versus management” etc.

….but the insidious battle it represents can be, and often is, present on any kind of team.

The meaning behind the phrase is a perception that the ideas, wellbeing, concerns and career growth of one part of an organization are not valued or appreciated by those running the organization or that certain parts of the team are favored over the others.

It is the classic “Us versus Them”.

It is the perception that parts of the team are not being listened to or that their ideas and needs are subordinated to those of others (usually to those of the higher paid or leadership level ilk”).

In manufacturing, this phenomenon is referred to as “floor versus carpet” (because the production floor is generally of bare concrete and the office space is usually carpeted) or “floor versus office”.

This perception creates numerous problems on teams, such as:

- Costly turnover of good people

- Toxic workplace culture

- Difficulty recruiting talented people (reputations get around!)

- Disengaged workforces

- Stagnating results

For this reason, it is important to understand what perpetuates this phenomenon in organizations and how to chip away at it and turn it around.

What perpetuates this phenomenon?

How are the seeds that grow into the floor versus carpet phenomenon sown?

The factors that exacerbate it are legion and depend on circumstances surrounding the individual team but the root cause is always the same……leadership!

Leadership climate and attitude towards the combined team and their deliberate investment in culture are the determining factors as to whether floor versus carpet mentalities and behaviors develop and perpetuate.

Leaders sow the seeds that will grow into a team-oriented culture or an “us versus them” one.

Based on feedback from team members I have worked with over the past 18 years in manufacturing, as well as my own observations, the following conditions are the largest contributors to this “us versus them” culture taking hold and metastasizing:

- No regular open communication or engagement from leadership on team goals and current progress achieved towards them

- Unclear or constantly changes priorities for the team

- No demonstrated desire or urgency to understand or address team concerns by leadership

- Lack of a consistent forum for all team members to share ideas for improvement

- Lack of follow through on ideas that ARE provided by teams to leaders

- The impression that particular departments are favored over others by leadership at the expense of others

- Lack of incentive payments consistently paying out in some areas (merit raises, employee profit sharing initiatives, etc.) while others do payout consistently (commissions, bonuses, etc.)

- Lack of concern over extended employee hours (late hours, weekends, etc) in certain areas while refusing to ask employees in other areas to work similar hours (implying that the time of those employees matter more than those you are asking to work ☹)

The connecting thread between all of these feedback points is that all of them, without exception, are only able to exist because leaders allow them to.

There are no “uncontrollables” here; all of these common points are enabled (and can therefore be disabled) by leadership!

How you can chip away at it

The good news is that since all of the points mentioned above that perpetuate floor versus carpet culture are within leadership’s control, they are in a position to chip away at them and turn the tides toward a better culture on their teams.

Not only that, it is actually not a very complex venture to do so.

Like most simple things, however, they are not necessarily “easy”; they require both courage and consistency.

The three actions leaders can take that will most impactfully chip away at a floor versus carpet culture are to:

1. Provide clear, honest and empathetic communication

2. Create forums that both solicit employee ideas and drive accountability for follow through on those ideas by leaders

3. Operate by transparent and consistent business processes that take the wellbeing of all team members into account

These serve to turn the cultural tide of your team in the following ways:

1. Provide clear, honest and empathetic communication from leaders

- Clear communication of the team’s overall goals (complete with specific outcomes each department within the team is expected to produce) and major priorities allow teams to understand both where their overall organization is trying to go as well as where each team specifically fits into that direction (most importantly that all departments within the team are in it together and are all equally important!).

- Honest assessments from leaders on how the team is performing towards those goals (whether good, bad or ugly) allows the team to not only understand whether it is winning or losing but it also allows them to understand and contextualize some of the changes or actions that they may see in their day to day work (reductions or increases in spending, additional staffing or lack of hiring, additional investment or lack thereof, extending or contracting hours, etc.).

- Honest communication around results or changing conditions provides the team context for changes they might see, which makes them easier to embrace (or at least to accept 😊).

- Empathetic communication requires leaders at all levels to focus on getting to know their teams and understand what is important to THEM (their concerns, desires, what motivates them, etc.). This gives leaders the opportunity to consistently keep their teams informed in the areas that are most meaningful to them (it also incentivizes leaders to act on what their teams are telling them is most important!).

- Don’t just communicate what is important to YOU to your teams, communicate emphatically by consistently speaking to what is important to THEM.

2. Create forums that both solicit employee ideas and drive accountability for follow through on those ideas by leaders.

- Team members are proud of the skillsets they all bring to the table and want to use those talents to improve their work as well as the overall results of the combined team.

- Creating effective forums that actively solicit team member ideas for improvement provides an easy way for team members to provide their observations that would make things better (notice I said “effective forums”, this is not a static suggestion box activity, it has to be more active and engaging than that!).

- For this to be sustained and effective, there also needs to be an expectation of follow through and support as needed on ideas that are provided to leaders and they must be held accountable to doing so (whether it be letting the team own the implementation of their ideas or actively helping, leaders need to act on employee ideas).

3. Operate by transparent and consistent business processes that take the wellbeing of all team members into account

- This can be the most challenging for leaders because high level processes can often seem like they are designed “by the carpet, for the carpet”.

- Processes such as annual budgeting, strategic growth planning and the like are often siloed among a few cloistered high level leaders and are often not broadly shared with, nor speak to the needs of, the broader team.

- Budgets, as an example, often clearly define the calculations of what level of earnings will be needed to trigger bonuses or commissions amongst the executive or sales ranks, but they rarely deploy the same rigor on what would need to be true to ensure the overall team receives their incentives.

- Budgets should clearly define things like “what level of profit is going to be needed to ensure employee raises are paid out” or “what is the profit needed to trigger employee profit sharing to pay out”.

- Defining these things and communicating them to the broader team provides connection, gives everyone something to shoot for and spurs an increase of discretionary effort by team members to achieve results (because they know how the results they produce will benefit THEM).

If you read closely between the lines here, what all three of these actions have in common is that they demonstrate to teams that leaders CARE about them.

The team’s perception of how much their leaders actually care about them will be the determining factor of whether their culture will lean towards “we are all in this together” or fall into the insidious rut of “floor versus carpet”.

Putting it all together

The floor versus carpet culture is not a given, but without active leader engagement it can often be the factory default.

It is a perception based phenomenon that can be either perpetuated or eradicated by leaders.

Chipping away at this toxic culture is not complicated but, like most simple things, it is not easy.

It requires a great deal of leadership engagement, courage and consistency.

The three main actions to focus on in this effort are to:

1. Provide clear, honest and empathetic communication

2. Create forums that both solicit employee ideas and drive accountability for follow through on those ideas by leaders

3. Operate by transparent and consistent business processes that take the wellbeing of all team members into account

Consistent efforts on these three things send the most important message to building a strong team culture………that leaders CARE.

If you do not show consistently that you and the leaders at every level of your team care, you are perpetuating an unproductive and underperforming culture.

Call it what you want, “us versus them”, “floor versus carpet”, “labor versus management”, they all translate to the same type of culture: Toxic.

Year end results reviews in business often have a subdued feel to them.

I have seen it in every industry and business I have been a part of over the last two decades.

While there are usually some successes to celebrate at these gatherings, there tend to be far more unaccomplished goals and missed targets to lament than there are achievements to hail.

You hear comments like,

“we really fell short on a lot of our strategic objectives”

or,

“we have set this goal for the last few years and have never been able to hit it”

or, one that I have heard often in recent years,

“we really have to do a better job on our say/do ratio”.

Many of these types of reviews I’ve attended have had the feel of an annual walk down a boulevard of broken dreams (again, shout out to Green Day….great song 😊).

The foundation of this depressing boulevard is often, unfortunately, laid down by leaders during the annual goal setting process and in the first few months of execution each year.

While it is absolutely critical to set stretch targets and acknowledge shortfalls when they occur, targets should not be set a in a manner that will ensure they will not be hit.

Yet, many businesses do just that as part of their annual goal setting/budget processes.

They make two common mistakes that dilute the alignment and the agency of their teams (the two most powerful ingredients to getting s#@% done).

The role leaders play in paving “the boulevard”

Leaders, deservedly, bear the lions’ share of the responsibility for annual goals not being met because they are the stewards of the system that dictates the level of success their teams will have in achieving them.

As stewards of the overall system of their business, they own the efficacy of the annual goal setting and support planning processes.

It is in this process that they tend to make two huge mistakes that doom their teams to repeated failure to meet annual objectives.

Mistake# 1: Too many priorities!!!

Instead of identifying the 2 to 5 most impactful strategic objectives to the success of their venture each year and lining up their teams’ energy and resources around them, too many leaders make the mistake of assigning more priorities than their team can handle given their time, capabilities and resources.

I have seen this “the more the better” approach when it comes to annual goals suck the life out of a lot of talented teams over the years.

I once worked for a company that set 37 strategic priorities during their annual goal setting process for a staff of 15 people to achieve.

You can guess how successful this company was in achieving its annual goals.

Think about what this does.

Setting more priorities than your team can reasonably accomplish within a year robs your organization of one of its two major points of leverage to get stuff done: alignment.

Too many priorities means that teams cannot effectively align their energy and available resources to maximize achievement because they need to split them between two many different areas.

This means that efforts, and thus impact, will be greatly diluted because the team was not afforded the opportunity to align and focus their energy effectively.

That is all on leaders!

The “the more the better approach” is not only ineffective, it is lazy!

It allows leaders to eschew the responsibility of thinking deeply to define the critical few objectives that could yield the greatest strategic advantage for their business in favor of the approach of throwing pasta at the wall and seeing what their teams can make stick by the end of the year.

Do not make this mistake.

Limit your priorities to a critical few and allow your team to align their talent, energy and resources to achieve them.

The fewer the number of priorities, the greater and more impactful the achievement!

Mistake #2: Failure to set clear deliverable outcomes for each goal!

Once priorities are distilled down and set, the second big mistake leaders often make is failing to provide deliverable outcomes that allow their team to measure success.

Too often goals look something like this:

- Improve speed of delivery

- Improve On Time delivery

- Reduce defects

- Launch new product line by x date

While these may be good general goals, without providing specific outcomes that define success for them, you risk setting your team and business up for disappointment.

As a leader, your job goes beyond simply defining things that need to improve; you need to define the level of improvement that represents winning for the business!

For each goal you establish, you need to give your teams specific deliverable outcomes that represent success.

Using the example goals above, deliverables might look something like this:

- Reduce average delivery time on lead products by 25% (from 4 weeks to 3 weeks)

- Improve on time delivery to top 5 customers from 85% to 95%

- Reduce year over year (YoY) scrap cost by $500,000

- Launch new product on time to deliver $1 million in sales by end of year

What does this do?

First of all, it forces leaders to do the necessary analysis that defines what success looks like and to communicate that clearly to their teams (an exercise that is often skipped).

Second of all it ignites the most powerful accelerant there is to driving results, the unleashed agency of the collective team!

Vague goals breed constant confusion throughout a team.

This necessitates constant clarifying questions be posed to upper leadership (slowing execution) and often results in dependence and micromanagement of the team because the guidance is not clear enough for them to operate fully independently.

When teams are neither micromanaged in their tactics to achieve goals nor forced to guess what success looks like because of vague objectives, they are free to use their own talents and initiative to create the specific outcomes being asked of them.

A team unleashed to determine how best to reduce scrap by $500,000 will operate with far more agency and efficacy than one only tasked with a vague goal like “reducing defects”.

“Well guided agency”, the ticket off the broken dreams boulevard

So how do you best avoid these mistakes?

The best way a leader can help their teams maximize their achievements is by promoting and enabling well guided agency in their organizations.

As established earlier, the two most powerful elements to getting things done in any team endeavor are alignment and agency.

A leader’s role in maximizing these elements is to focus the team’s effort on only what is most important (and not waste time on things that are not!) and define the clear deliverables that the team needs to create (the outcomes, not the tactics!).

In short, to maximize well guided agency on any team or in any organization, leaders need to limit priorities, define measurable outcomes and let go of the controls!

To effectively do this:

1. Do not assign your team more priorities than can be effectively attacked within the year with existing time and resources. Limit your annual goals to the critical few that will create the biggest impact for your team or business. (3 to 5 max is a good rule of thumb for most organizations)

2. Do not set targets that are so vague that the team cannot effectively execute them independently.

3. Define the specific outcomes for each goal that the team needs to produce and let them use their own agency, initiative and judgement to determine HOW to produce those outcomes.

Providing your teams the opportunity to maximize their well guided agency towards your strategic goals gives your organization the best chance of success (and is also one hell of an edge to have over your competition because relatively few organizations do this well 😊).

Putting it all together

Don’t set yourself and your team up for disappointment year after year by saddling them with vague goals that they cannot independently act on effectively or too many goals for them to achieve with their current time and resources.

The two most critical elements to getting things done are alignment and agency; the above approach stifles them both.

Instead, unlock your team’s potential by facilitating well guided agency in your organization by:

· Focusing on the “critical few” goals that will make the biggest impact in the coming year (~3 to 5).

· Making each goal highly specific

· Defining measurable outcomes for each goal that the team must deliver (and allowing them to own HOW to deliver them)

Limit priorities, define measurable outcomes and let go of the controls!

The mood at your annual results reviews will feel a whole lot better 😊.

“That’s not going to work here Sean, we are a regulated industry”

It was a refrain I was to hear often in my first foray into introducing an aligned CI (continuous improvement) system into a regulated manufacturing environment.

I was working in the medical device industry at the time with the assignment of introducing a CI system across multiple manufacturing facilities globally with the goal of aligning them all under a Lean based operating framework in order share best practices and improve productivity.

At a high level (and in theory), everyone was excited about it.

We had many Lean enthusiasts within the organization who were eager to reap the rewards that a CI framework based on operator empowerment, continuous learning, experimentation and incremental improvement could provide.

There was one problem; medical device manufacturing is a regulated industry.

The boogeyman of “regulation” is a REAL thing.

The idea that you would empower the people closest to the work to make changes to processes based on learnings at their level terrifies leaders in regulated industries.

They feel that doing so puts them at risk of being stamped with the scarlet designation of “non compliant” by their regulating body.

Be it the FDA, EPA, SEC, or even non-government affiliated certification bodies like ISO, the idea of being labeled “non compliant” by any of them gives Chief Compliance Officers and Quality leaders PTSD inducing nightmares.

However, the problem with this fear is that it is usually not of the regulations themselves (these regulations are a good thing, without them how safe would your medicine, food, medical implants or financial investments be?), but rather the fear of changing anything at all!

“Compliance” with regulating body requirements is too often conflated with permanent compliance to the processes that currently exist in your business as they stand today.

This is not only misguided and completely not the case but it is a surefire way to stagnate your results and put your company out of business.

In my experience, you can be both compliant AND continuously innovating and improving at the same time by observing the following three rules.

Rule #1: Know the actual compliance requirements of your regulating body

Do not make regulations more constraining than they actually are!

Read and understand the compliance requirements of the institution that regulates the industry you are in (the FDA blue book for example) and how they apply to your business processes.

While there are often some concrete and non-negotiable specifics, there are also higher level compliance elements that allow for flexibility and innovation.

An example of this latter type of requirement would be the need for lot traceability of raw materials and manufactured product batches in the medical industry.

The regulations do not define how this is to be done within your processes, they only stipulate that the processes you utilize must be able to provide this traceability.

This means that you can change your processes in order to improve outcomes; the new processes just have to satisfy the regulated traceability requirement.

Rule #2: Ensure your CI process changes comply with those requirements

If you find an opportunity to change or improve a process within your business, make sure that the new process still conforms to the regulatory requirements.

Using the traceability example mentioned earlier, let’s say you identify an opportunity to reduce the number of steps in your receiving process in order to increase speed and reduce cost.

As part of your validation of this new process, you will need to ensure that it satisfies the level of traceability the regulations require.

If an improved process satisfies the regulations, it is both compliant AND better!

Rule #3: Document any changes made to existing processes

This is an area where regulatory environments are slightly more complex.

In non regulated environments, processes can be changed constantly without little need for centralized control and documentation.

In regulated environments, however, there needs to be a method to trace process changes to validate process control (to ensure that any changes went through the compliance validation steps described earlier).

Whether it be revision (Rev) control or Engineering Change Request (ECR) processes or some other such method managed by a compliance representative within the business, there needs to be a governed process for changes that ensures that all processes continue to comply with regulations.

Following these three rules, teams can constantly innovate processes and strive for continuous improvement even in regulated industries.

As a CI guy in the medical device field, I had to use them a lot. 😊

Successful CI Implementation in the Medical Device Industry…..a Visual Daily Management Story

I believe that the foundation of any aligned CI/Lean based operating system is a strong Visual Daily Management Program.

This is not merely a lean tool (as many cottage industry template salesmen would have you believe) but a cultural construct. It requires daily participation, daily learning, daily leadership and daily discipline. For me, it is the foundation upon which the rest of a successful CI program is built,

It creates a tiered communication and learning system where teams at every level:

- Measure daily results

- Measure performance trends over time

- Establish the major causes for their pain points (Pareto)

- Initiate, assign and capture actions to address these causes

- Determine whether actions improve results

- Learn and repeat

As the global CI leader, this is where I chose to begin my efforts to align the operating framework for all of our global medical device facilities.

We provided an aligned framework in which each plant was to develop the most meaningful KPI’s for each tier of their individual businesses (Plant, Value Stream, Cell) in the categories of Safety, Quality, Delivery, Cost and People (SQDCP).

*NOTE: I would advise against dictating the actual metrics to be measured; measures of effectiveness in these categories will often differ from plant to plant within the same business. Empower your teams to determine which metrics would be most meaningful in each category for their team and business. It is the disciplined measurement, learning and acting that is important, not the specific metric.

For each of these categories, each visual board at each tier would have information flow in the following manner:

- Daily Results

- Performance Trend

- Pareto of issues

- Actions to address

As we taught the teams the purpose, benefit and conduct of this daily ritual, the excitement that was generated was palpable.

The idea of teams being empowered to track, learn and improve the processes of their daily work (and hold leaders accountable to supporting them to do so) drove the type of genuine enthusiasm that would fire up any CI or Ops guy worth his salt.

Then, the specter of the regulatory boogeyman struck.

In a few of the plants where we implemented this, some of the compliance personnel were uncomfortable with the idea of issues being visually represented on the boards.

The two main issues they had were:

1. They were uncomfortable with the idea of problems being laid out visually on the boards

2. They were uncomfortable with the “actions to address” portion of the boards being populated

Their fear in both cases was that, in the event of an audit, a regulatory auditor might:

a) see all of these issues (our dirty laundry in the eyes of the compliance team) and get a negative impression

OR

b) ask for evidence that action was taken and that any resulting changes to documented processes were still in compliance with regulations.

Rather than allow this to derail the effort to implement this important foundation, we used the three rules discussed earlier to ensure that our Visual Daily Management Framework was compliant with the regulatory requirements our industry was held to.

Given that we were required to document any process changes for traceability of compliance with regulations, we added a field on the Actions to Address sheet that would capture an Engineering Change Request (ECR) number for any process change.

Compliance team members were assigned to each visual board, would attend the daily management meeting, would audit that all process changes annotated on the sheets had an ECO form number and would sign off on it.

All ECO forms would be maintained by the compliance department and would document any process change as well as the validation that the new process was in compliance with regulations.

In the event of an audit, these could easily be produced for the auditor as evidence of compliance process control.

This alteration alleviated the fears of the compliance group and allowed the operators and team members in the facilities to continuously evaluate and improve their processes.

They were able to continuously innovate while remaining in compliance with their regulatory body.

Putting it all together.

Regulation does not mean paralysis!

Being compliant with regulations does not mean permanent compliance to your processes as they currently exist, it just means that any process improvement you make needs to comply with overall regulations.

Continuous Improvement methodologies such as Lean can be just as effective in regulated industries as they can in non regulated ones (as a matter of fact they can actually be more so; compliance can be an amazing spur for follow through on actions 😊).

While the approach to implementing CI in regulated environments requires some unique modifications, do not let that stop you from reaping the benefits of engagement, empowerment and results that a culture of Continuous Improvement can provide.

Follow these three rules:

Rule #1: Know the actual compliance requirements of your regulating body

Rule #2: Ensure your CI process changes comply with those requirements

Rule #3: Document any changes made to existing processes

Do not be ruled by fear of the Regulatory Boogeyman………he is not as tall as you think he is 😊

One of my favorite quotes about resilience comes from Winston Churchill, when he said:

“Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm”

Why is this important?

Because in any venture, no matter what it is, failure is going to happen constantly!

- Adverse conditions will cause failure

- Unexpected situations will cause failure

- Incorrect assumptions and hypotheses will cause failure

- Flawed plans and strategies will cause failure

All of these things are universal issues that any team, of any type, will face and will face often.

Resilience in the face of these things is the ultimate edge any team has over their competition.

What separates the good and the great teams from the bad and the ugly ones is the spirit, grit and resilience to not only push through these conditions but to adapt, learn, grow and improve as a result.

When a non-resilient team hits a wall or an unexpected issue, they fall down, blame one another and become paralyzed until someone else moves the obstacle out of their way.

When a resilient team hits the same wall, they regroup and figure out how to get over, around, under or through it.

They also learn from the experience, grow from it and use it to help them knock down future walls.

Resilience allows those teams who have it to consistently move forward and grow regardless of obstacles, while it dooms those teams without it to inconsistent results and stagnation.

While some people are naturally resilient, for most it is a learned behavior (and a highly contagious one).

The most influential factor in the resilience of an overall team is that of its leadership.

The behavior leaders display during times of distress, when hit with the unexpected, or when met with disappointment sets the tone for the rest of the team (who often mimic and perpetuate that behavior as their own response).

Because of the outsized influence leaders have on their team’s resilience, if you are lucky enough to be in a leadership position it is extremely important to examine your own behavior when hit with the unexpected.

Do you react the way you would want to see your team react? If not, you need to address your own behavior.

Two of my favorite examples of the profound impact a leader’s behavior has on their team’s resilience come from military history:

- Lieutenant General (then Lieutenant Colonel) Hal Moore at the Battle of LZ X-Ray during the Vietnam War

- General Ulysses S. Grant at the Battle of Shiloh during the American Civil War.

Hal Moore at the battle of LZ X-Ray

The Battle of LZ- X-Ray was a three day long fight in the Ia Drang Valley in Vietnam in 1965.

The subject of both a famous book by Hal Moore and Joseph Galloway (We were Soldiers Once… and Young) as well as a famous film (We Were Soldiers, which starred Mel Gibson as Moore), this was a notoriously hard fought battle between a US Cavalry Regiment and a far larger North Vietnamese unit.

The fight was unexpected on the part of Moore’s 7^th Cavalry Regiment, who were surprised both by the attack as well as the size, coordination and intensity of the Vietnamese army that was attacking.

To avoid what could easily have become a chaotic defeat and disorganized retreat, Moore instilled calm in his team by circulating through the battlefield, encouraging his units to stay calm and keenly observing both where the enemy was coming from and the tactics they were employing so that he could effectively counter those tactics (in this case with a lot of indirect fire and close air support coordination).

The resilience shown by Moore during the battle spread like wildfire through the ranks of his broader team to the point that not only did the 7^th Cavalry not retreat, they forced the retreat of their far larger foes.

After the battle, Moore articulated the responsibility that leaders have to actively spark the resilience of their teams when they are hit with the unexpected. In those moments, Moore Said:

“There are two things a leader can do, either contaminate his environment and unit with his attitude and actions, or he can inspire confidence”.

This is to say that when leaders react to set backs, disappointments or crises with drama or defeatism, their teams will catch that disease and it will spread like a plague.

The reverse, however, is also true.

When leaders respond to these things with curiosity, hope and determination, these reactions will be just as contagious and spread just as rapidly.

Ulysses S. Grant at Shiloh

My other favorite example of this phenomenon in practice is one from the American Civil War at the Battle of Shiloh.

In April of 1862, Grant was leading an Army incursion down southern waterways in Tennessee.

On April 6^th, his army was hit with a surprise attack from Confederate forces that they did not realize were in the area.

What ensued for the remainder of the day was intense fighting that culminated in the Union Army being nearly routed and pushed back into the Tennessee River.

Grant was not on the ground when the attack started, and when he finally reached the fight he found his army in disarray and running out of ammunition to fight with.

Seeing this disorganization, Grant immediately began circulating amongst the individual units, providing guidance on how to regroup to keep up a sound defense and had ammunition brought to the areas that needed it most.

Because of this resilient action by Grant, his army regained their courage and fought the Confederates to a standstill until dark.

This would have been impressive enough; but Grant was not done.

As darkness fell, Grant’s subordinate Generals were understandably expecting orders to conduct an organized retreat overnight.

After all, it was already a great success that they were able to overcome the shock of the surprise attack, withstand the Confederate barrage and not be overrun.

Looking to receive these orders, General William Tecumseh Sherman approached Grant as he was sheltering from the rain, sitting under a tree and smoking one of his trademark Cigars.

As Sherman approached, he said “well Grant, we’ve had the Devil’s own day haven’t we”.

Hearing this, Grant raised his head, looked at Sherman and confidently said, “Yes. Lick ‘em tomorrow though”.

Sherman was stunned. Not only was Grant not going to give orders to retreat, he was going to give orders to attack at first light!

Grant’s resilience was infectious and those men who had fought and bled all day and were fully expecting to retreat not only did not do so, but proceeded to attack and defeat the Confederate Forces (who were also expected them to retreat and were shocked that they were attacking) the following day.

Grant’s calm in response to the initial confusion and the resilience he sparked in his team to push forward through the example of his behavior resulted in one of the first significant victories by a Union Army in the war up to that point (who up until that time had built up a bit of a reputation for retreating when faced with adversity).

Putting it all together

Resilience is the ultimate edge any team has over their competition.

The opportunity, as well as the problem, is that it is a highly contagious learned behavior.

When leaders are resilient, it spreads like wild fire across their teams.

When they are not, lack of resilience spreads with equal rapidity.

If you are wondering why your team either is or is not resilient, the root cause can usually be found in the mirror....take a hard look.

- Jim Mattis

Everyone wants a culture of empowerment, until it’s time to empower people

Empowerment is a very popular word in corporate culture.

When asked how they would describe their leadership style, many corporate leaders say “empowering”.

When asked what type of culture they want to see on their teams, many executives would say a “culture of empowerment”.

The reason this concept is so popular is that it is undeniably effective!

Empowering people allows for maximum speed, innovation, capability growth, morale, results and succession pool for future leadership for any team, no matter the type of work.

The problem with this concept, however, is that far too often it is a virtue signal rather than an actual intention in the corporate world.

The reason for this is simple. Empowerment is hard!

It requires a sacrifice that many leaders are not willing to make, even those who think of themselves as “empowering”; it requires leaders to give up control over all things tactical.

That is not to say that leaders disengage from the tactical. Far from it!

Teams need an engaged leader to advise, support and mentor them as they work to achieve the organization’s goals.

What they don’t need is a leader to dictate to them “how” to execute their day to day jobs in order to achieve those goals.

Why?

In addition to wasting a team’s talent and tanking their morale by way of this tactical micromanagement disguised as leadership, failing to empower people accelerates the stagnation of your entire organization.

Growth? Capability? Innovation? Longevity? All stagnated by lack of empowerment.

Think about it.

By failing to give up the reigns on tactics, you are requiring your team to conform to doing their jobs as YOU would do them.

This is not what empowerment is about.

Micromanaged drones that are just expected to follow your orders will not make your venture adaptable and successful in the long run; you need mavericks for that!

For a team to be empowered, they need the space and encouragement to be Tactically Insubordinate when necessary.

The importance of Tactical Insubordination

Having grown up in the operations ranks during my professional career, one of my favorite roles was that of plant manager.

The opportunity to lead an interdisciplinary team was both exciting and humbling.

Since my base of expertise was operations, I could not (if I wanted to be successful) dictate to leaders of those specialties that I had little to no experience in how to do their specific jobs in support of the overall goal.

I was forced instead to shift the focus of my leadership energy to crafting, articulating and coaching the vision, strategy and objectives that we were trying to achieve as a team and allow my leadership team the room to establish the best way for them to achieve them.

There was one function, however, that I was naturally geared to interfere with more than the others; operations.

As an operations leader by trade, I had no shortage of opinions on the right way to lead and manage in that function, both strategically and tactically.

In one of my plant manager roles, I noticed my operations manager getting generally frustrated, short with his teams and peers and the results in operations were beginning to slip.

He was not sending any of this frustration my way directly, but I could tell something was off.

I sat him down one morning to give them this observation and to ask what had changed.

The answer floored me.

“I feel like my talent is wasted here”.

When I asked him what made him say that, he delivered a haymaker straight to my gut.

He said “You micro manage me more than the other managers”.

As the conversation progressed it became clear that I was giving far more tactical direction to him than I was giving to the rest of the team because I had a lot of experience in his function, but not as much in those of the others.

After a little self reflection, I realized that he was exactly right.

After taking a deep breath, I told him that in the future I wanted him to push back on me forcefully if he felt I was stepping too far into the tactics.

I told him:

“I want you to be strategically compliant, but tactically insubordinate”

What I meant by this was that I wanted him to ensure that his actions and those of his team were in alignment with the vision, values and goals we were trying to achieve, but that determining the best way to achieve them was his lane and should be empowered to pursue his ideas even when they differed from how I would do it.

I wanted him, and all the other leaders on my team, to challenge assumptions, including my own, and to look for and fight for better ways to do things.

I needed my mavericks to be mavericks!

The concept of tactical insubordination is important for several reasons:

1. The empowerment of people to use their own talents to make their own decisions about how to achieve the overall team goals is what allows them to grow.

Growth only occurs when people are free to analyze situations, make decisions, fail, learn from failures, gain perspective, succeed and then teach others.

If leaders tell people WHAT to do, they are robbed of these growth opportunities and the team stagnates.

2. Failure to allow it robs people of ownership of their work and results.

If people are just told what to do, they may execute but will feel little to no connection to the work and take little to no ownership of the results.

(As an aside, I always chuckle a bit when I see the concept of “ownership” fetishized and trumpeted by leaders that refuse to relinquish enough control for their teams to “own” anything 😊).

3. It creates an environment that encourages constant challenging of the status quo and promotes innovative thinking across the team.

Conditions are constantly changing, which means that tactics need to constantly adjust even if you are chasing the same goals over time.

The danger of discouraging tactical insubordination and encouraging compliance to tactical orders from above is that those dictates are usually made by leaders who have not had their hands in tactics for some time and are just perpetuating the same tactics that garnered initial successes.

That is a surefire recipe for stagnation, organizational decay and an eventual full scale beat down of your enterprise by your competition!

For all of these reasons, it is important to not only not discourage or punish tactical insubordination but to actually promote and reward it in your organization!

As Jim Mattis expressed in his book, “Call Sign Chaos”, you need to protect your mavericks!

Maverick thinking is what spurs innovation and winning!

Strategic Compliance; the Maverick Management Tool

Now, there are unproductive ways to be tactically insubordinate that leaders often lean on as their excuse for discouraging it.

To be clear, being obstinate or contrarian just for the sake of it or acting in a way that is out of alignment with the vision, values or strategy of the organization is not maverick behavior, it is toxic behavior.

Some leaders, fearful of their mavericks driving unproductive discord on the team, are uneasy with allowing them too much freedom.

That is where the Strategic Compliance component described earlier comes in.

While you should champion your team’s efforts to be mavericks when it comes to challenging convention, leaders must also challenge their mavericks to prove that their proposed methods are in alignment with the strategy.

The strategy is the organization’s “what”.

- What the mission is

- What the cultural values are that we expect the team to live by

- What the behaviors that we expect our leaders to model are

- What the major focuses are that will help us achieve the mission

Tactical empowerment is all about giving people the freedom to determine “how” best to achieve the “what”.

Leaders need to challenge their teams to articulate how their tactical approaches align with and enable these things.

The” how” needs to be flexible; the “what” must be non-negotiable.

Strategic compliance is the maverick management tool for leaders!

Putting it all together

The benefit of maximally empowered teams on capability, innovation, agility, morale and results is widely accepted and promoted but less widely implemented.

Leaders often struggle with the idea of truly relinquishing tactical control, especially in the areas where they have deep background and experience.

This results in leadership micromanagement of tactics to the detriment of their team’s growth, innovation and results.

To avoid this and to create a culture of growth, innovation and continuous improvement, leaders need to encourage maverick thinking and tactical insubordination on their teams.

Doing so drives innovation and agility for the entire organization.

To ensure that tactical insubordination on a team is aligned with the vision, mission and values of the organization, leaders need to push their teams to both challenge the status quo in thought and method while maintaining strategic compliance with the overall goals.

The marriage between these two concepts will both spur continuous innovation while maintaining consistent forward progress toward your objectives year after year.

Give your mavericks the freedom to be tactically insubordinate.

Lead them be strategically compliant.

The call for change is constant.

No matter what type of organization you work in, you will hear the drumbeat calling for the need for change constantly banging away.

You hear things like:

“People need to be more open to change”

“Nothing ever changes around here because no one is willing to do things differently”

“We need more change agents”

These calls do not just come from the top.

In teams I have been part of or have observed, people at every level consistently express the desire to see change in some form or fashion.

Change in policy, change in recognition, or a general change in outcomes are frequently clamored for.

The problem is that there is an inherent contradiction that stands in the way of these yearned for changes ever coming to be.

That contradiction is that we usually want SOMEONE ELSE to change their behavior, policies or processes to deliver the improvements that are sought while being very slow to accept the need to change anything about our own.

Guardians of the status quo

Often times those most adamant about the need for change are also those most defensive about changing the way things are currently done.

Tell me if you’ve heard this one before:

1. A member of a team points out an issue that is causing problems.

2. The team analyzes the situation and talks about what might be causing it.

3. The team determines that the current process is causing the problem and must be changed in order to solve it.

4. The team member who raised the issue staunchly defends the current process even though it is not delivering the desired outcome because they are comfortable with it.

When we are comfortable with the status quo of our individual work process or, worse yet, created that work process ourselves, we tend to defend it tooth and nail even if it is contributing to the negative outcomes we want to see changed.

We passionately guard our status quo while continuing to demand a change in outcome.

In short, we demand change while being unwilling to change anything ourselves.

Why? Because we are human!

It is a natural human tendency to defend the familiar versus the unfamiliar.

It is a natural human tendency to defend a process or policy that you yourself had a hand in creating, even when it is proven to not work (I hear that whole ego thing is very real 😊).

I have seen this multiple times on teams I have been a part of and have even caught myself being that status quo guardian on occasion.

The problem is that outcomes do not change if nothing about the system that produces them changes.

Any of us can fall into this very human trap, but there is one group that is most prone to it and can have the most damaging impact by perpetuating it: LEADERS!

Leaders, the catalysts or asphyxiators of change

If any of the rank and file can be guardians of the status quo, leaders can be the Guardians of the Status Quo Galaxy!

As leaders we can have that brutal combination of arrogance and influence that drives us to simultaneously call for change, be unwilling to change status quo processes (especially ones we authored in some way) and build a culture of resistance to change across our teams as a result.

Now, tell me if you have heard this one before:

1. A leader in an organization demands a change in results.

2. Their team analyzes the situation and determines that the change requested will require a change of business process, budget or organizational structure.

3. The leader refuses to listen to the need for these changes to the system while persisting in their demand for change in results anyway.

4. Team members at lower levels dig in on their status quo processes because the higher level teams have set the example for them to follow.

5. No process changes are made to change the results achieved.

6. Results do not improve.

7. The leader is mad.

8. The organization’s morale is bad.

9. The leader repeats the call for improved results.

10. Rinse and repeat the above.

When a leader is, consciously or unconsciously, a guardian of the status quo there is a ripple effect that washes over their entire organization.

A leader’s inflexibility to change the processes that represent their status quo while demanding results different from what those processes are producing sets the example for all teams in their orbit to follow.

This can have the effect of asphyxiating the growth of your team and the improvement potential of your results.

Fortunately, the reverse can also be true.

When leaders challenge their own status quo processes and demonstrate the willingness to change them as needed to improve the organizational environment and results, they both inspire their teams to do the same and truly earn the right to expect them to.

By doing so, leaders can serve as the catalyst for a culture of continuous improvement across the team.

Putting it all together

As W. Edwards Deming famously said:

“Every system is perfectly designed to give you what you are currently getting”

Meaning that results do not change without changing the system that produces them in some way.

Most of us consciously recognize this but tend to advocate for change while defending our own status quo (processes, behaviors, etc.).

Anyone can fall into the trap of being a guardian of the status quo, but leaders have a particularly devastating impact on their teams when they do so.

Leaders that want their teams to be agile and open to change need to set the example by challenging their own status quo when results are not where they should be.

Whether it be high level business processes, historically accepted assumptions or organizational structures, leaders need to set the example of being willing to change the status quo as needed if they are not producing the results desired.

Without setting this example at the highest levels, you are building a culture of status quo guardianship at all levels below you that will asphyxiate the long-term growth and results of your team, no matter how talented they are.

Have you ever been part of a team that, in spite of high levels of talent, had trouble consistently achieving strategic goals or objectives?

This can be a confusing experience.

We often make the mistake of assuming that because we are leading teams composed of highly talented individuals, accomplishing our strategic objectives is an inevitability.

We just as often make the mistake of determining that when those assumptions prove false, that our team members were not as talented as we thought.

How could they be if they are struggling to perform?

Usually a team’s inability to perform, particularly an interdisciplinary team representing multiple departments, is not a talent problem, it is an alignment problem.

A team with multiple departments or multiple subject matter experts coordinating together to achieve strategic goals is going to see priorities and problem sets from their own functional angles.

Each team member is going to view the goals through the lens of their specific role on the team.

- Operations teams are going to focus on efficient production that maximizes output and minimizes cost.

- Quality teams are going to be focused on minimizing non-conforming materials getting to customers.

- Sales teams are going to focus on whatever is needed to satisfy potential customers and ink the deal and win business.

- Finance teams are going to focus on maximizing P&L resource utilization within the team to best enable profit.

- Supply chain teams are going to focus on minimizing cost of materials and reliability of on hand stock.

- Etcetera, Etcetera.

The inherent danger of failing to align the efforts of all of these groups into a coherent whole is that very talented team members can perform very well in their individual areas and tank the team in the process.

- Operations can maximize output at the expense of true customer need.

- Quality can make standards so stringent (beyond customer requirements) that is impossible to get any products to customers on time.

- Sales can win business at the expense of profitability, the ability to service more strategic customers or win business that is not aligned with core company capabilities (business you do not want).

- Finance can maximize P&L performance at the expense of long term growth.

- Supply chain can maximize piece price reduction at the expense of manufacturability of material or increase the need to stock excess inventory to hit volume discounts.

No amount of talent can offset the impact of poor alignment on your overall team.

As leaders, it is our job to provide that alignment and enable our teams to leverage their talents in a way that maximizes collective results.

How do we do this?

We provide our teams with an Interdisciplinary Rosetta Stone.

What commonly stalls the results of interdisciplinary teams is a lack of a clear overall vision for them to then calibrate their functional lens to and align their actions and measurements to support.

A clear organization vision provides this.

This is the Interdisciplinary Rosetta Stone that only leaders can provide for the team.

It aligns the efforts of every function and allows each team of each discipline to translate the overall vision into their language.

The Interdisciplinary Rosetta Stone- the Leader’s alignment tool

At this point you are likely rolling your eyes and saying, “Sean, is all of this blather just about the need to have a clear overall vision for your teams to execute to? Isn’t that simple, day 1 stuff?”

You’d think so right?

It is, however, the exception and not the rule that organizations provide an effective vision that aligns and incentivizes all disciplines on their teams towards collective success.

There are several common reasons for this:

1. Vision is too vague (or does not exist at all): If the vision exists at all, it is often more high minded philosophy than a quantifiable statement of objectives.

2. The vision is not communicated to all team members: Having words plastered across posters in your offices or on websites for you customers does not constitute understanding and alignment to the vision by your team. If your team does not understand what the vision is and how they individually contribute to it, it might as well not even exist.

3. There is no connection of the vision to execution: The vision is not used or called back to by leaders in order to guide decisions or evaluate performance of each function on the team or of leaders within the organization.

4. Functional incentives are not tied to the vision: The measurements utilized to determine compensation or incentives for each team member is not tied to the collective team goals/vision, resulting in departments working at odds and results being erratic.

For a vison to serve as an effective alignment tool for interdisciplinary teams to act in concert and achieve overall goals consistently, all of these things must be addressed.

How to wield this tool effectively

The good news is that addressing these items and transforming your vision into an effective alignment tool is not overly complex, it just takes additional thought and leadership.

For example:

1. Vision is too vague (or does not exist at all): Attach qualifying language to each of your objectives that allow for clear evaluation of potential decisions and clear measurement of success.

For example “Profitable Growth” vs “Growth” or “Rapid and High Quality Delivery” vs “Rapid Delivery). This allows you to better evaluate whether your decisions or performance align with your overall objectives.

2. The vision is not communicated to all team members: This is perhaps the easiest issue to address but many still struggle with it.

The communication of your vision and your goals to your team is your leadership responsibility.

Your team members need to not only see your vision in writing, they need to hear the context of it and how THEY directly contribute to it from YOU and their direct leaders.

Too often, the responsibility of articulating organizational vision to team members is outsourced to chain emails (when oftentimes not all of your employees even have access to email) or marketing created products (posters, websites, slides on flatscreens in your buildings, etc.).

None of these efforts provide connection or context for your team, which will not allow them to act toward your vision.

Communicate the vision directly to your team and incorporate it into your ongoing business and communication processes.

3. There is no connection of the vision to execution: The vision should be called back to in every meeting where decisions are being made or progress is being assessed, this calibrates the measuring stick of success to how well performance is in alignment with the vision.

4. Functional incentives are not tied to the vision: KPI’s or performance targets for every function must be designed in a way that ensures that if they are performing well, the team is performing well.

One department or function cannot be incentivized or rewarded for actions or achievements that are to the detriment of the team as a whole (see examples of the many ways this can happen in the first section of this article) drive unproductive behavior that will slow the team down.

There are many different ways to go about doing these things that will look slightly different depending on what business you are in or what type of mission you are trying to achieve, but the overall themes above need to be addressed if you are going to fully align your team and maximize its overall potential.

Putting it all together

A more aligned team beats a more talented team 10 times out of 10.

A team of highly talented people can struggle mightily to achieve consistent results because their talents in their individual disciplines are not collectively aligned to deliver the overall goals.

One of the most powerful alignment tools a leader can provide is a vision that is:

- Clear

- Communicated to all team members

- Formally connected to execution

- The determining factor for incentives and recognition

A vision that meets these criteria becomes an Interdisciplinary Rosetta Stone that allows team members of every discipline to translate it into their language and maximize execution.

I know this seems like simple, basic stuff that organizations should do that should be hardly worth mentioning.

I do not disagree, it does seem simple (and it really is!), but for some reason a lot of organizations and teams fail to do it.

Does your organization provide this tool to its teams?

Do you provide it to yours?

If you have worked for any company or organization for any amount of time, the clarion call for “more employee engagement” eventually floats down from the halls of power to the masses.

You have heard it all before, likely often.

You have heard it shouted by leaders from corporate stages.

You have heard it promoted as critical during business reviews or strategy meetings.

You have seen companies plaster the walls with graphics advocating the value they put on employee engagement.

You may have even seen it listed among your company’s core values.

There is both truth and tragedy in these measures.

Truth in that employee engagement is a results multiplier unlike any other an organization can invest in.

Tragedy in that these calls for employee engagement are often completely hollow, almost to the point of being cynical, because they are not matched with any investment or serious plan to achieve it.

The benefit of engagement? It builds an autonomic nervous system for your organization!

The best encapsulation of the benefit of team member engagement I have ever read comes from Taichi Ohno (famous for his role in founding the Toyota Production System).

In his book, “The Toyota Production System”, Ohno likens truly engaged team members to the autonomic nervous system in the body.

For those who were not biology majors (like me 😊), the autonomic nervous system is the internal network within your body that controls involuntary functions like breathing and heartbeat.

This system allows for all of these functions to occur freely without you having to think about them or intervene in any way as conditions change.

In building the Toyota culture, Ohno saw engaging and empowering team members as a way to create an autonomic nervous system in his factories.

The theory being that if team members were informed, engaged and empowered, they would be able to act independently towards goals and adapt to changing conditions everyday without any need for leadership intervention.

No need for permission, no waiting on leader guidance on basic issues or simple problems, just a continuously learning and improving autonomic nervous system on the shop floor that achieved innovative and consistent results all on its own every hour of every day.

Think of the benefits of having this type of system independently active in your organization or on your team.

How much faster would you achieve progress toward your goals (no matter what they are)?

How much could you grow your organizational capabilities by?

How much more productive could you be with the same amount of resources?

How much higher and more electric would the morale be on your team?

How much more high level talent would you be able to retain and attract?

The answer to all of these question is the same……A LOT!!!

By building your team’s autonomic nervous system through engagement, you are literally creating a self sustaining engine that increases your speed and quality of results forever and makes you nearly impossible to compete with!

So, there is a LOT of truth in the messaging from leaders that more engagement is needed….but to understand why it is so rarely achieved, let’s focus on the tragedy mentioned earlier.

The key building blocks of engagement

The key building blocks for engagement are simple but are by no means easy.

Those building blocks are:

1. Connection

2. An Enabling Environment

The “Connection” building block is achieved by:

- Connecting team members to one another through a clear vision (objectives, deliverables, priorities).

- Connecting each team member to the vision (articulating how the work of each team member contributes to the goal and providing a way to measure whether that contribution is being made).

The “Enabling Environment” building block is achieved by:

- Building a leadership culture that promotes the development and empowerment of people.

- Designing systems and processes that are mutually supportive to achieving the vision.

- Incentivizing the behaviors that you want to see take root as the base culture.

As I stated at the beginning, these two building blocks are not easy.

They require thoughtful design, courageous leadership, continuous investment and consistent follow through to take hold and produce the type of engagement that will create an unbeatable autonomic nervous system.

They are also, however, not complicated.

They merely require the choice be made by leaders to focus on them.

How most organizations get it wrong

The buzz saw that most organizations run into is that while their messaging claims to want engagement, their methods to achieving it are misguided.

Instead of building the foundational connection and enabling environment described earlier, most companies resort to a series of disjointed quick fixes.

Things like:

- Regular employee surveys

- Random pizza parties or free meals

- Marketing blitzes extolling the value of employee engagement

Not that any of these things are bad per say. But when they are done in isolation, unconnected to an overall plan to build the needed foundation, they do little but pay lip service to engagement and achieve no traction toward it as a result.

They also tend to drive cynicism among teams who feel that these efforts are only token and that no real change for the better is really coming (which, let’s be honest, is usually true).

In short, most organizations try to achieve engagement on the cheap, with as little investment in thought, leadership and time as possible.

This is the tragedy of going about building engagement the wrong way.

These efforts always fail because the people within the organization recognize it a mile away and will not buy in to a cynical campaign.

How to get it right

While there is no one right way to build the autonomic nervous system that engagement creates in your organization, the areas to focus on in order to do so are always the same.

Channel the efforts of yourself and your leadership teams into building the foundation of connection and enabling environment into you organization.

Connection:

- Create and articulate a vision that all team members understand

- Define how each team member in the organization contributes to that vision and provide them with ways to measure whether they are making that contribution.

- Talk about the vision in every meeting, town hall and individual interaction with your team to re-emphasize its importance and how the team is performing to it.

- Consistently recognize specific milestones the team achieves toward the vision.

- Create feedback loops between the teams and leadership where ideas for improvement can be shared by the team and evidence of leadership follow through on those ideas can be seen.

Enabling Environment:

- Define the leadership behaviors you expect leaders in your organization to lead their teams with and that you would like to see take hold as your base culture.

- Publish those behaviors openly so that leaders are measured on their modeling of these behaviors as part of their evaluations and so that their teams can hold them accountable to modeling them as well.

- Evaluate the current design of your processes and systems in terms of:

1. individual effectiveness in allowing teams to achieve the vision

2. how they interact with one another (are they mutually supportive, are they at odds, do they exist at all etc.) and work with your teams to get feedback for improvement and refinement.

- Incentivize those who model the behaviors you identified as your desired cultural behaviors.

What these distinct steps look like in your individual organization might look slightly different depending on what your mission or purpose is, but the overall focus on these two building blocks leading to more engagement on your team is universal!

Channel your leadership efforts into methodically focusing on these two things and you will massively increase the likelihood of earning the engagement of your team!

Putting it all together

The ubiquitous call for more employee engagement in most organizations is absolutely a worthy one.

The ability to create a continuously learning, growing and improving autonomic nervous system in your organization by engaging all of your team members will supercharge your daily results and enable you to attract and retain high capacity talent.

The way to sustainably harness this engagement is not easy but it is also not complicated.

Focus your leadership energy on building the foundational components of Connection and an Enabling Environment. This will sow the seeds of a system that will maximize the continuous engagement of your team members.

Avoid focusing on disconnected quick fixes like surveys, free lunches or marketing blitzes (unless they are part of the larger foundational plans).

Token focus promotes cynicism and disengagement among your team members and makes it looks as though you are unwilling to make meaningful change.

You cannot earn team member engagement on the cheap; you and your leadership teams have gotta roll up your sleeves and put the effort in!

In the military, a force multiplier is a key element or combination of elements that make the overall unit more effective because of it (them).

Whether it be a technological enhancement that with the right training, guidance and leadership makes a unit more formidable than it might have been otherwise (a longer range scope that increases a team’s ability to engage from farther away than their adversary for example) or a culture within the unit that energizes the team to accomplish the mission better than other units with the same personnel and resources, the characteristic element of force multiplication is that it upsizes the capability of the team as a whole and makes it better suited to achieve its mission.

In observing teams looking to achieve goals in multiple industries over the past 17 years, this concept is just as applicable for any purpose outside of the military.

The biggest opportunity to apply and reap the results of this concept?

LEADERSHIP!

Why?

Because the whole purpose of leaders is to increase the capabilities of their teams and better enable them to accomplish their mission, i.e. force multiplication.

When a leader is a force multiplier, they enhance the skills, capabilities and spirit of those under their charge and enable the group as a whole to achieve more with the same personnel and resources than they otherwise could have on their own.

Leadership is the only thing that can do that in ANY situation, no matter the mission or purpose.

If a leader is not doing so, they are not providing the level of value that they could be to their team.

The common block to force multiplication among leaders? Ego and insecurity!

In my experience, the biggest stumbling block leaders trip over that prevents them from being force multipliers is their own egos or insecurity.

Being a force multiplier as a leader means that your main focus is on enabling the environment (vision, systems, leadership culture, etc.) that your team needs to be able to win rather than dictating how that winning is to be done.

This means letting go of the controls over how goals are achieved and allowing your team to chart that course themselves (enabling their continued growth in the process).

Your job is to create the conditions for them to be successful and to provide the guidance they need to make the right decisions to win.

This can be tough for many leaders because they tend to come from a place of deep experience in at least one aspect of the organizations they are leading and therefore have some thoughts (and probably a good deal of passion) about how things should be done.

As a result, many leaders fall into the trap of focusing too much on how the work is getting done rather than focusing on the outcomes and whether the environment they are providing their teams is allowing maximum opportunity to achieve them.

Whether it is through ego or insecurity, many leaders focus more on control over their teams than the empowerment and growth of their teams.

This leads to micromanagement of team members or team tactics, both of which inevitably lead to:

- Hesitant execution by teams (feeling they need permission before acting to avoid an ass chewing from the boss)

- Reduced team speed due to lack of agency

- Reduced innovation or continuous improvement due to team disengagement

- Stagnation due to lack growth opportunities for team members

- Reduction in talent due to turnover (your most talented people will last only so long in an environment where they are not permitted to grow and win!)

In short, egotistical or insecure leaders become force suppressors that stifle their team’s potential rather than multipliers that unlock it!

In leadership, your individual skills do not matter if your net impact on the team’s capabilities are suppression or reduction rather than multiplication.

Continuous improvement leadership as an example of force multiplication in practice

As an example of this concept in action, consider a continuous improvement leader in an organization.

Like any other leader, A Lean/CI leader’s entire purpose is force multiplication.

The upscaling of the overall team’s capability to see problems and solve problems fast and to independently execute the PDCA cycle to maximize speed of execution and sustainment of continuous improvement are their principle aims.

A CI leader that is very good at these skills on their own and can execute them to perfection individually is far less impactful than one who can serve as a force multiplier and increase the team’s capability to do these things independently.

It is this “force multiplication” from an impactful CI teammate that enables the speed, scale and sustainable improvement that an educated and empowered team in CI brings to the table.

If the teams capability is not increased; the moment an event or initiative is over, the sustainment of the result will begin to degrade.

It takes empowering the team with the capability to understand and employ the tools on their own and energize them to do so to achieve sustained continuous improvement and breakthrough.

So, in terms of CI leadership, what does Force Multiplication look like in action?

1. Focus on teaching the team the value of CI in their language (how does it address their individual concerns? What problems can it solve for them and how? As cool as some of us CI types find the literature and clinical terminology, consider your audience and give it a rest when necessary 😊).

2. Allow teams to utilize their creativity and initiative in applying CI tools (even if it is not the way you would have done it in the same situation…………freedom of application breeds ownership down the road, not doing it breeds lack of engagement and often times cynicism about CI, besides, it’s about the team, not you😊).

3. Encourage questioning and debate of the tools and their value in any given situation by the team (if the tools is the right one for the application at hand, they will withstand scrutiny).

4. Make a conscious effort to involve diverse, cross functional groups for any CI activity. This will create greater awareness across the entire team of CI concepts and provide them a seat at the table in their application and use (people tend to be more inclined to own things that were done with them rather then to them!).

All of these actions together focus on increasing the effectiveness of the entire team through providing an environment of learning, experimentation and empowerment.

Putting it all together

There are many more examples of what this looks like in action (more than I can list here) ,but I challenge you to ask yourself the next time you are leading a team (whether it be on a CI project, a business initiative or mission of any kind), is your leadership a force multiplier or a force suppressor?

Is your leadership increasing the team’s capability to achieve the mission when you are not around?

If not; it is a great opportunity for reflection, and dare I say it……continuous improvement 😊.

Focus your leadership time and energy on providing your team the environment and conditions they need to maximize their collective potential.

That is the key to unlocking and unleashing the full abilities of your team and multiplies their results without any additional manpower or resources. Force Multiplication.

Failing to focus on this and instead focusing on dictation or control of your team’s actions results in dependence, sluggishness, stagnation and talent loss (either through disengagement or attrition). Force Suppression.

Ask yourself again. Is your leadership, and that of your leadership team, a Force Multiplier, or a Force Suppressor?

At every level, from CEO down to team leader and beyond, Leadership sets the tone for the culture that will take hold on any team; whether the culture is electric or toxic, it is all due to the quality of leadership.

While it is extremely important to define the right leadership behaviors to build the best culture for the mission your team is trying to achieve, it is equally, and maybe even a little more, important to understand the leadership behaviors that create toxic cultures.

The impacts of toxic leadership are drastic, far reaching, extremely contagious and will kill culture far faster than any good leadership can build it.

For that reason, it is critical to study both good and bad leadership in equal measure.

While there are many different opinions on what the most toxic leadership traits to look out for are, I think the best single summary I have ever seen came from Lieutenant General Hal Moore.

For those unfamiliar with him, Moore was a revered US Army Officer who, among many other amazing accomplishments over an illustrious career, led the 7^th Cavalry Regiment during the Battle of LZ X-ray in the Ia Drang Valley during the Vietnam War (a battle chronicled in depth in the book “We Were Soldiers Once and Young” by Hal Moore and Joseph Galloway, which was later made into the feature film “We Were Soldiers”, starring Mel Gibson).

In his book “Hal Moore On Leadership: Winning when Outgunned and Outmanned”, General Moore lays out some of the leadership traits and styles that DESTROY team culture and performance; what he calls the “toxic strands of leadership”:

1) Bully leaders: Leaders that lead through threats, insults and ultimatums, and actively look to invalidate the opinions of others.

2) Narcissistic leaders: Leaders that are arrogant and self congratulatory, only allow their ideas to be pursued in any situation and see themselves as the sole reason for any success.

3) Divisive leaders: Similar to narcissistic leaders, but channel their aggression towards particular groups or individuals they disagree with and launch campaigns to turn others against them as well.

4) Insular leaders: Leaders that develop cliques and shield their inner circles from accountability. Insular leaders also tend to create an “us against them” culture in their teams, which even if it produces results within the team creates toxicity with the rest of the organization.

5) Hypocritical leaders: Leaders that set high standards for those they work with and lead, but do not hold themselves to those same standards.

6) Enforcement leaders: Leaders that seek approval from superiors at the expense of their subordinates. Leaders of this type will follow orders that they know will hurt their teams without questioning them in order to maintain favor from their bosses.

7) Callus leaders: Leaders that disregard the welfare of their teams due to lack of empathy.

8) Seniority Preference Leaders: Leaders that will only listen to (and give preferential treatment to) those with the longest tenure in the organization, regardless of merit of the ideas/arguments. These leaders tend to drive high turnover in early tenure team members.

9) Credit hog leaders: as the title suggests, these are the leaders that try to take credit for everything their team does rather than make sure the credit goes to the appropriate team member.

10) Blame shifting leaders: Leaders that look to assign blame to people for every failing (rather than the process) and always ensure that they keep the blame off of themselves.

Moore emphasized that while people who lead with the traits listed above may have titles that give them authority over people (President, Commander, Director, Manager, etc), they are not leaders.

He encapsulates this idea with one of my favorite quotes that I have used with my teams frequently over the years:

“Commanders are not always leaders. Commanders are appointed. Leaders are informally elected by their troops” - General Hal Moore

Moore explained that whenever he took command of a unit, he would diligently look for these traits in the leaders of his troops and would act quickly to either correct this behavior or relieve them of their leadership positions.

For those of us looking to build winning teams, I would suggest we all do the same!

Putting it all together:

If you are striving to create a cohesive and high performing team culture, take a hard look at yourself and your leadership team.

If any of the toxic traits described by Hal Moore above, or any others that you believe are intolerable for the culture you are trying to build, are present, you need to address them immediately.

Either work with your leadership teams to change their behavior or remove them from leadership roles

If these behaviors are prevalent or tolerated today, your team’s culture is likely en route to toxicity (if it is not there already) because your leadership actions are not aligned with your stated mission, goals and values.

Define both the leadership behaviors you expect out of your team as well as those you will not tolerate.

From there, clearly communicate them to the entire team and hold all leaders (yourself included) accountable to them.