How to Build a More Engaged Leadership Team Through Team Development
Institutional knowledge and some form of culture is certainly part of every organization today. While people may not be as loyal to companies and vice versa now compared to twenty years ago, there are employees who stay where they are for a variety of reasons. Similarly, organizational cultures build along those same lines. People come, people go, but often, cultures are formed and stay relatively stagnant over time. This can obviously be a good thing or a bad one, depending on the need for organizational change and fresh perspective.
I’ve been in my current role for over 4 years now and I inherited a good leadership team. About half of the group has been in the organization for at least a decade (we can use that as a dividing line) and in their leader roles. The other half, relatively newer to their seat in leadership. All the leaders, at least those having direct reports, have been to some form of individual leadership training. While they did attend the training in cohorts (several were in the same cohort together), this training could still be viewed, in my opinion, as individual training. Everyone got something out of it, but more so in a “what’s in it for me” way instead of how they could lead together as a team.
Like most organizations, we helped our organization survive the pandemic from a business continuity perspective while continuing to innovate. This certainly took its toll. We’ve discussed, in leadership team meetings, words like overwhelmed and saturated when it comes to describing how people are individually feeling. As a result, that burden became palpable across the entire team, and it was evident that an intervention of some sort was needed to help us work better as a team.
Fast forward to this past December 2022 when I brought in a consulting company to work with us as an entire leadership team. We went through our first session together and no one really knew what to expect. We went through and learned about a process called Co-Elevation??where we were taught, as a team, how to win together, a mantra that accompanies us to all our leadership team meetings and is one of our guiding principles and part of our overall “north star”. We performed a survey as a group that night, and while we didn’t see the results until the next session, I was not surprised that there were several traits in which we fell well short of industry baselines in several key categories.
Perhaps the most powerful part of that first night and session, in many ways, was a process that’s called “the long, slow dinner”. While it’s not trademarked, it’s less about the meal and more about the discussion that accompanies the meal. We’ve had a total of 4 of these long, slow dinners so far, but the first one was really the one that set the stage for most of our future work together through these leadership sessions and working as a team. It is said that for any good relationship to work, there needs to be trust. To get to trust, people need to be open and vulnerable with each other. People may have worked together for years at a time and never really gotten to know each other.? That’s usually why teams don’t work as well as they should.
So, a particularly probing and open-ended question was asked the first night that was meant to be thought-provoking, in the spirit of getting people to open up, talk about themselves in perhaps a way none of the rest of the group ever knew. The results were quite shocking to me because my team has always tended towards quiet, reserved, and perhaps, not very open. We had a lot of candid conversation that evening, and it’s really set the stage for us to be able to grow and develop cohesion as a team.
We are certainly more candid and accountable to each other since we’ve started the process. We’ve learned some new techniques and changed the way we work with each other as a leadership team and as an IT organization. We’ve learned a lot about each other and continue to foster relationships. Lastly, through peer coaching and intentionally applying the frameworks and techniques we’ve learned, we’ve become a better leadership team collectively.
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Author:
CIO, UCLA Anderson School of Business
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