1: “Managers are thermometers, and leaders are thermostats,” Carolyn Dewar, Scott Keller, and Vikram Malhotra write in their book CEO Excellence: The Six Mindsets That Distinguish the Best Leaders from the Rest.
Managers react to what happens. They solve problems and deal with the here and now. They measure things and report out results.
“Leaders influence their environment,” Carolyn, Scott, and Vikram write. ” They alter people’s beliefs and expectations. They cause action, they don’t just measure it. They are continually working toward a goal.”
What is one of the critical levers leaders utilize to achieve these ends?
They invest in team building.
Which is often met with pushback by “the inevitable naysayers,” the authors note.
GM CEO Mary Barra says, “When we started to explicitly focus on building a high-performing leadership team, people were saying, ‘Mary’s making us do therapy.’ I’d say, ‘No, I’m not, I’m just investing in your leadership and in this team.’ ”
Leaders who stick with it and prioritize team building produce powerful results.
“To a person today if you asked, ‘What is one of the reasons why we’ve been able to drive success?,'” Mary reflects, “they’d say it’s because of our high-performance teamwork.”
Carolyn, Scott, and Vikram observe: “Virtually every CEO we spoke to reported similar experiences with team building. . . All of the best CEOs carve out team time to specifically reflect on how to improve the ways in which they’ll all work together.”
When Westpac CEO Gail Kelly announced she was bringing her leadership team together for their first two-day off-site with a facilitator work on “team dynamics,” she was met with resistance.
Gail simply brushed it aside because she knew that was what was needed. “There were sessions where people got to speak about what made them tick, what made them anxious. I did it, too,” she remembers.
“I’m prepared to be very vulnerable, and asked others to do the same. We developed a little book called The Story of Us, and each one of us had a page about what strengths we had, and what things we are working on. What’s our personal vision? Not just the vision for the company, but what’s your own vision? What really drives you as an individual? It really helped build trust.”
She later used the book in the future to integrate new members into the leadership team: “With every new person who came on board later, we had them do The Story of Us.”
Gail also conducted 360-degree reviews with her top team, including herself, to generate input and insights on each member’s strengths and opportunities.
“We’d sit in a big circle, literally, and talk about our feedback,” she recalls. ” It required a lot of trust, and a lot of mental preparedness to be vulnerable and open. I also got our general managers, the people below us, the very senior and respected executives, to come and tell us as a team what we needed to do better. And we said to them, ‘Right, we’ve got some improvements to make, here’s what we’re going to do to be better.’ It really worked for us.”
2: As management consultants working for McKinsey, Carolyn, Scott, and Vikram have asked more than five thousand executives to think about their “peak experience” as an executive team member and to reflect on the word or words that describe that environment.
“The results are remarkably consistent and reveal three key dimensions of great teamwork,” they note.
“The first is alignment on direction,” they write, “shared belief about what the company is striving toward and the role of the team in getting there.
“The second is high-quality interaction, characterized by trust, open communication, and a willingness to embrace conflict.
“The third is a strong sense of renewal, meaning an environment in which team members become energized because they feel they can take risks, innovate, learn from outside ideas, and achieve something that matters—often against the odds.”
What does the research show when there is improvement on these dimensions?
For every 20 percent improvement, team productivity, on average, doubles.
3: Engaging with an impartial, third-party executive coach is a best practice.
“We had the Authentic Leadership Institute come and spend a couple days with us doing Organizational Behavior kind of work,” says DBS CEO Piyush Gupta. ” It was cathartic. We all looked deep into ourselves and said, ‘What are we about? And what’s our purpose? And what makes us tick? And how do we align the company?’ ”
The initial two-day session at DBS began an ongoing process of team renewal and improvement. “We’ve now done more work like that, where we help each other be better and become better as a team,” he shares.
U.S. Bancorp CEO Richard Davis employed a slightly different approach. ” An outside facilitator did a very interesting exercise which was, ‘I want all of you to rank all twelve members, including yourself, in terms of who you trust the most. Then draw a line above anybody’s name who you think falls below the level of trust you would wish to have.’
“I promised that if anybody in the team came up on the low end, I would share that with them, so that the goal would be not to call out a shortcoming but to indicate to them that I’m going to operate a trust-based team.”
Other CEOs have a “leadership team coach” who joins their team meetings to provide real-time feedback on how they work together. The goal is to “better understand the causes of unintended conflict that can emerge in group settings,” the authors write.
“I had a coach help our team,” recalls Cadence CEO Lip-Bu Tan. ” We took the Myers-Briggs personality test, which enabled us to get to know each other a lot better. . . We got to know what made each other tick, know about each other’s families, and we were able to better care for each other as a result.”
DBS CEO Piyush Gupta reflects: “I’m a big believer in off-sites and parties. I’d much rather spend money on those things than give cash bonuses because I think the value you get from getting people together and the memories an sense of camaraderie you create is a lot more important.”
More tomorrow.
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Reflection: Are there any specific best practices I can learn from the best CEOs about team building?
Action: Do it.