1: The best CEOs establish a mindset for their leadership teams.
“The top team is every member’s ‘first team,'” McKinsey consultants Carolyn Dewar, Scott Keller, and Vikram Malhotra write in their book CEO Excellence: The Six Mindsets That Distinguish the Best Leaders from the Rest.
“The best CEOs are unequivocal on this issue,” Carolyn, Scott, and Vikram note. “This means that everyone is expected to put the company’s needs ahead of those of the business unit’s or function’s. . .
“The mindset of a top team member is not: ‘I’m on the team to represent my function or business,’ but ‘I’m on the team so I can represent to my function or business.'”
Doug Baker, former CEO of Ecolab, says: “My request to all my teammates was that they have one foot in my job and one foot in theirs. So our job here isn’t to maximize, for example, Human Resources (HR) effectiveness. HR is here to maximize Ecolab’s effectiveness. Their job is to help the company; the company is not here to help HR. That’s how it works. Same with the CEO, by the way.”
U.S. Bancorp’s Richard Davis puts it this way: “The holy grail is to have twelve people on a management team who are equal voices and equal storytellers. That means they can speak for the team, for the company, not just for themselves.”
This mindset also reflects how each leadership team member views the customer experience. Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson reflects: “Each member of my top team knows that it’s their job to represent the corporation as one and get the right people lined up to serve customers.”
She describes this ethos as being part of “One Lockheed Martin.”
Other CEOs have similar mottos to capture the “First Team” mindset. Sony CEO Kazuo Hirai uses the phrase “One Sony.” Caterpillar CEO Jim Owens refers to it as “Team Caterpillar.” Greg Case uses the expression “Aon United.” Publicis CEO uses the mantra “The Power of One.” KBC CEO Johan Thijs labels it “Team Blue,” which refers to the color blue, consistent across all the countries where the company operates.
IDB CEO Lilach Asher-Topilsky calls her management team “the Fist” because “You can’t get in the lines between the fingers. Not the board of directors, not the union, not the competitors—not anyone.”
Medtronic CEO Bill George calls his executive committee “Enterprise leaders” because “they had to help me run Medtronic, because I couldn’t run it alone.”
2: Several of the top CEOs established a set of rules to help govern the team. Westpac’s CEO Gail Kelly states, “We developed a behavior charter that became absolutely written in steel for us. We had it with us at all of our meetings. We referred to it often and reviewed our behaviors against it.”
The Westpac behavioral charter included behavioral norms like: “If any of us is unhappy about something, we are going to put our hands up and say it. If we have a problem, we’re going to talk about it soon and ideally face-to-face. We’re not going to let our general managers fight it out for us as proxies.”
And: “We will never undermine someone behind their back. If we as a team agree on something, even if as an individual you didn’t agree with it in the meeting, and even if it’s not the path you would’ve chosen, you will back it anyway.”
Gail believes the charter “really helped diminish the politics. It doesn’t eliminate it totally, but it cuts down on it, because people were accountable to this team as their first team.”
3: Setting high expectations and reflecting and discussing how the team performs against those expectations is a critical best practice.
“After making a major decision,” Carolyn, Scott, and Vikram write, “many of the best CEOs will carve out an extra thirty minutes with their team to reflect on their decision-making.
“For example, did team members feel in synch from the outset regarding what they were trying to achieve? Did they feel excited about the conclusions once reached? If not, why? Did they feel as if they’d brought out the best in one another?
“The answers to such questions,” the authors note, “provide a postmortem opportunity for the team to learn together, and often trust deepens regardless of the answers.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: What is the mindset of my leadership team members? Do they see the leadership team as their “First Team,” or are they representing their function or business unit? Are there best practices I can implement based on Carolyn, Scott, and Vikram’s findings?
Action: Discuss at a team meeting or with a colleague.
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