Reimagining Excellence through Enterprise Leadership: Lessons from Total Football

As a CEO, you've made concerted efforts to foster trust and collaboration in your organization, dismantle silos, and implement flexible structures. Yet, a sense of division, often invisible yet palpable, lingers. While your executive team is forthcoming within their domains of expertise, they tend to retreat into silence when the conversation shifts beyond their specialism. This pattern indicates a persistent silo mentality, a hidden cultural barrier, which necessitates a shift in mindset. Enter 'Enterprise Leadership'.

Enterprise Leadership transcends functional expertise and operational responsibilities. It demands a shared ownership mindset, encourages collaborative problem-solving, and prompts leaders to venture outside their traditional domain comfort zones. It's about viewing the organization holistically, understanding the broader impact of individual decisions. Just as a player on the sidelines can change a game's dynamics through a high ownership mindset, so too can every leader contribute significantly to the organization's holistic success.

The magic of this approach is illustrated by 'Total Football,' a strategy that champions adaptable role-switching in response to the game's rhythm. Now, what if we traded the football pitch for your executive suite? Think 'Ted Lasso' meets C-suite - but with fewer mustaches. In this scenario, each leader becomes akin to a Total Football player, understanding the whole game, not just their function. This, in essence, is Enterprise Leadership: a unified, adaptable team pulling together to score shared strategic goals.

The transition to an Enterprise Leadership mindset involves overcoming resistance to change, fear of losing domain control, understanding gaps between roles, and communication barriers. A key step to reducing resistance is to ensure that all team members take full ownership of the strategic priorities and commit fully to the adoption of an enterprise leadership mindset.

We've developed an interactive exercise to foster this alignment. This exercise visualizes the organization's top strategic priorities and assesses each team member's agreement on importance, sense of ownership, and confidence in achieving these priorities. Each factor is represented by a colored dot placed on a scale, sparking open discussions about alignment and ownership, and surfacing any disagreements or misconceptions. This exercise culminates in a shared understanding and commitment to adopt a high ownership mindset for each strategic priority.

With full ownership established, the next phase involves exploring the correlation between the Enterprise Leadership mindset and Patrick Lencioni's 5 dysfunctions model. This deep dive into trust, conflict, commitment, accountability, and results provides a clear roadmap for the transformation towards Enterprise Leadership.

1. Trust in Enterprise Leadership: Leaders trust in the collective decision-making for the enterprise and believe in their ability to contribute valuable insights beyond their primary expertise.
2. Conflict: Enterprise Leaders value and engage in cross-functional debates, contributing to innovative solutions even in unfamiliar territories.
3. Commitment: Leaders commit to the collective strategic priorities of the organization, demonstrating readiness to contribute beyond their traditional domains.
4. Accountability: Leaders hold each other and themselves accountable for overall organizational results, acknowledging their actions' broad influence.
5. Results: Success is measured not in individual outcomes, but in the collective results delivered for the organization through collaboration.

Embrace the Enterprise Leadership approach. Break down the invisible silos, foster a high ownership mindset, and propel your organization towards holistic success. And who knows? With this approach, you might just find your team hoisting the corporate version of the Premier League trophy at year's end.

(Image by pressfoto on Freepik)