Does your company run like a 1st grade soccer team?

Something happens…. A client complaint, a process breakdown, or product development going south. Immediately, people around your company descend on the issue like a SWOT team, stepping from their day job to “do what it takes” to solve things.

This may sound like an admirable display of team unity. If it happens more than rarely, it’s a sign of tremendous dysfunction in your company that can grind things to a halt. You are operating like a 1st-grade soccer team, and if you don’t solve it the chaos will continue until your company fails to grow and people get burnt out and resign.

Let me explain. If you have not had the pleasure of watching a 1st-grade soccer team they operate like this; someone kicks the ball down the field, and every single person on the team outside of the goalie (and sometimes even the goalie!) starts chasing the ball. Nobody has a position or knows what the team is supposed to do, and nobody is playing defense – they just chase the ball around the field.

Now I’ll bring it back to your business. Every time people step out of their jobs to put out the latest fire drill, they are no longer doing their own function. This results in one of two outcomes – a lack of progress with the things they are accountable for or a sense of frustration at the late nights and weekends it takes to get their work done. Either is a toxic environment to a healthy, vibrant culture of shared accountability, trust, and accomplishment. It also results in way too many cooks in the kitchen on the fire drill issue itself, further impacting culture and rarely leading to the best outcomes.

The root cause here is simple. Most businesses lack a clear definition of accountabilities for each role, and/or a lack of the right people in the right seats for those roles.

Solving this starts with understanding and defining the right roles not for the people in the company but for the company to truly execute successfully across all key functions. Take people out of the equation and define what roles need to exist to achieve the most success with the least amount of pain. Make it simple, but crystal clear, what each seat is there to do, what defines success, and the core accountabilities that enable this success to occur.

Only then look at your people and decide whether you have the right people for each of these seats. If you do, let them run with things and hold them accountable to achieving success in that role – with clearly set definitions of what success looks like and how it contributes to team success. Where you don’t have the right person, recognize that your own failure as a leader to address this issue is at the very root of not enabling your team to play their positions – and reinforces the 1st-grade soccer team dynamic that’s killing you.

Next Level Growth guides fast growing companies with a passion to become elite in their industry set and reach higher summits for their business. For more insights on how to get the right people in the right seats for your business, one of the Five Obsessions of Elite Organizations?, visit our website and take our complimentary Business Health Check-up at https://nextlevelgrowth.com/checkup/ .

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