What’s more important, a strong leader or a strong team?

Wait. Don’t answer yet. I know you have an opinion (everyone does), but let’s look at some of the dynamics first.

My colleagues and I work with a lot of executive teams, each led by CEOs with distinct strengths, personalities, and preferences. Let’s isolate three:

• Team 1 is led by a brilliant, poised, confident CEO who has earned a gilded reputation as a wizard of portfolio management. His commercial success has not made him arrogant or attention seeking, but he is highly independent in his judgment. In team dialogues, his opinions are like anvils. When they land in the room, everyone feels it.
• Team 2 is headed up by a CEO with a mind like a jackrabbit. Her thinking is quick, agile, and at times unconventional. She’s witty and clever, but with deep compassion and a crystal clear sense of purpose and direction. And she’s impatient. No meeting ends without action plans, due dates, and clear accountabilities. Slow is not an option.
• Team 3’s CEO is a deep thinker. He listens, speaks, and even moves deliberately. He is prone to long silences to form thoughts, and weekend essays to clarify his strategic perspectives. But these habits don’t slow him down. Always prepared, he is a remarkable synthesizer of complex inputs, often cutting through noise when others can’t. The classic tortoise in a field of hares.

All three of these CEOs have the respect and engagement of their teams. All three are, by and large, successful in the eyes of their boards and shareholders. And all three CEOs share a common dilemma: Each is certain that their team is not operating in a way that will create the change needed to respond to a shifting business landscape.

This is not an uncommon perspective. We know that most CEOs feel their teams perform at average levels or worse, and that those evaluations deteriorate over time . It’s also true that many CEOs struggle with the leadership behaviors that create team effectiveness .

But beneath these patterns is a deeper reality – one that’s important to recognize if a senior team is to pivot to a new way of driving progress. In each of the three teams, members routinely contort themselves to the styles and preferences of the CEO, at times to the detriment of alignment and team performance.

• On Team 1, leaders hesitate to take bold action because they don’t have the same credibility as the CEO. They seek the CEO’s sanction before making big calls.
• Team 2’s leaders often struggle to keep up with the CEO, not because she’s too smart, but because she moves so quickly from idea to action (they often don’t get the chance to dissent).
• And on Team 3, leaders spend inordinate amounts of time trying to figure out what the CEO is thinking, or how he’ll react to a proposed course of action (they’re often wrong).

These patterns become norms, often without any overt recognition that they exist, or how they might be affecting team performance.

And that’s where the similarities among the three teams end. Only one of these teams has begun to successfully move the needle in addressing the shared dilemma. How? By surfacing, exploring, and together evaluating the norms and patterns that the team has adopted.

And let me emphasize the word “together.”

On the surface, there’s no harm in a team adjusting its habits to the style of its leader. To some degree this is appropriate and can be linked to the success of many leaders. It’s when these adjustments begin to channel and constrain team behaviors that mirroring CEO styles can inhibit success.

Team 2 (sparked by the CEO’s request) has taken this on directly, as a team. They started by completing a team effectiveness survey, which my team analyzed and compared to other senior teams to identify unique strengths and patterns that may be getting in the way of progress. They then held an offsite session to explore their team habits and tendencies, and the implications to their change agenda.

But here’s the important part: They didn’t stop with the analysis. They used it as a launchpad to identify important adjustments and come to agreement on a Team Credo. The credo is concise. It fits on a single page and articulates their shared expectations and commitments to how they will work together moving forward. It includes how they will discuss, debate, and make decisions; how they will prepare for and conduct team meetings; expectations for candor, mutual feedback, openness, and respect; and their commitment to continuous growth and development as individuals and as a team.

None of these commitments nullify or diminish the unique strengths and styles of the CEO. In fact, these were topics of discussion, explored openly as a team. With expert facilitation, they held a conversation that not only recognized the strengths of the CEO, but also those of each team member to create more shared awareness of their collective assets.

The CEO summed up the effort as “a complete game changer.” Stopping to take stock of the team’s habits and relating them to the change agenda unfroze the CEO’s thinking, and the team’s ability to hit the reset button. Results have been almost instantaneous. The CEO has made clear adjustments to how (and how quickly) she expresses her opinions and moves to action. She has given clear license to her senior executives to slow her down and ensure that there is more dialogue and input before leaping to action. She has also installed a routine feedback loop allowing each of them to provide candid, anonymous feedback about how she’s doing.

They’re on the move. Still high-speed but acting more as a team. More aligned, and with more shared trust.

Okay now you can answer the question. What’s more important, strong leader or strong team? My answer, as you might have anticipated, is “Yes.”

Is your executive team intentional about how they operate? Or, are they like most teams that simply adopt patterns established by the preferences and style of the leader?

I hope you and your team are on the path to great performance. Please share your thoughts and have a terrific week.?

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