What’s your team’s purpose?

When I am coaching leadership teams, I ask about the purpose of the team. The responses are usually mixed, lacking clarity and alignment.

The individual members are heads of functions or subject experts and see their role in the team as representing that expertise or lobbying for their department.

Whoever established the team and recruited the members did so for a reason – the purpose of the team. They may not have explained that to the people, assuming it was obvious, and left the members to get on with it.

I often challenge the team to rediscover its purpose. Sometimes they ask the person who established the team or they start afresh and agree it based on what they know and what their immediate situation demands.

Once they are clear on their purpose, they can collectively lead on purpose – the start of joined-up leadership.

Few operational people study leadership; they may have seen a film on Shackleton or read a book on Churchill. Mostly, their training has been technical and statutory, which, combined with their considerable energy, has gotten them here – into the leadership team.

But leadership is different, it’s less about departmental technicalities and more about enabling people to come to work and do their best work in line with the organisation’s mission.

If you are about to establish a leadership team, or you are in one and wondering about its purpose, then here are some pointers taken from classic books on the topic, along with some updates and opinions based on my experience.

“The leadership team defines the organisation’s direction, ensures alignment around core goals, and translates vision into actionable strategy” – extract from Leading Change, by John Kotter.

I think it’s important to have a vision of where you want the organisation to be in the future; it sets the general direction.

Of more importance, I believe, is where you are now – ‘location’. The leadership team can then work away from ‘location’ towards ‘vision’, inspiring the people to get from here to there.

Understanding where you are now sounds easy, but it’s not – evidenced by the multitude of diagnostics, psychometrics and team assessments available nowadays.

I tend not to use these and prefer to elicit 20 incontrovertible facts from the team, describing where they are now and then to watch their surprise.

2. Foster a cohesive and trust-based culture

“Strong leadership teams model collaboration, trust and accountability, creating a unified culture across the organisation” – extract from The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, by Patrick Lencioni.

Culture is what you no longer notice once you have been here for six months. If I was the leader, I’d want you to let me know what you notice in your first month or so; though I’d have to enable your confidence to tell me.

That few people share what they are noticing speaks to the ambient culture and lack of ‘location’ awareness. There is much work to be done by the leadership team here, on culture.

I’d also want ‘ethics’ on this leadership team’s agenda – it’s a hot topic these days and rightly so, though rarely mentioned.

3. Drive organisational performance and execution

“[Leadership teams] make high-impact decisions, allocate resources and ensure operational excellence and accountability at all levels” – extract from The Effective Executive, by Peter Drucker.

Operations, moving resources around, fixing problems and reporting on the money – we are not short of management, but this is the leadership team! I’d have less of the effort on this and much more on the rest (of this list).

Driving execution and performance seems to be the ‘comfort zone’ and where the reward and recognition is to be found.

4. Lead change and innovation

“Leadership teams manage transformation and adapt to external change while sustaining core operations” – extract from Adaptive Leadership, by Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky.

There’s a great quote: ‘Leadership is navigating the ship through stormy seas while totally rebuilding the ship at the same time’.

Navigating stormy seas is core operations and rebuilding the ship is ‘transformational’ change. Yes, this is what leadership is about, though I’d challenge the notion of transformational – most of the change I observe is incremental.

Incremental or ‘better’ is okay. Keep enabling better and soon things will be great round here.

5. Build and manage stakeholder relationships

Leadership teams represent the organisation’s interests with partners, clients, regulators and communities, maintaining alignment and trust externally.

And I would add ‘reputation’. The CEOs I’ve come across over the years have all been highly tuned in to reputation or what they might call ‘brand’.

Your brand is your reputation in the marketplace and ‘how we do things round here’ is your culture.

Brand and culture are two sides of the same coin – they are inseparable. ‘How we do things round here’ is felt out there.

And how we are perceived out there is felt and affects us in here. I work to get leadership teams talking more about brand and culture, and less about operations.

6. Enable cross-functional collaboration and communication

“[Leadership teams] break down silos, promote knowledge sharing, and ensure consistent communication throughout the organisation” – extract from Primal Leadership, by Daniel Goleman et al.

Here’s another part of this leadership team’s purpose given over to the primary focus of operations and performance.

Throughout my near 50-year career, I have heard it said many times that ‘engineers are poor communicators’. That may be the case, though I suspect it’s just not a priority.

I often hear ‘…and how are we going to communicate this?’ – the afterthought that it is. We plan for production though never, it seems, for communication.

It’s also very difficult for this leadership team to break down silos when it is formed of departmental heads each lobbying for their own silo. 

7. Develop future leaders

“They cultivate leadership at all levels, ensuring succession planning and ongoing organisational health” – extract from The Leadership Challenge, by James Kouzes and Barry Posner.

Over several years I kept asking project leaders who was responsible for cultivating and developing their staff. Most answered: ‘HR’. And I would ask the same of HR, and they said: ‘the PD’ (project director).

Staff development has fallen between the two stools, and there never was leadership development; you got there by force of will, or ‘character’. Though I would say that there is so much more to character than force of will – a topic for another day.

Conclusion

So, this is the purpose of a leadership team, at least according to some of the classic books on the topic.

There is a lot to get a handle on and that’s why it’s got to be a team rather than a single heroic leader. And a very joined-up, cohesive and purposeful team at that.

Dave Stitt FCIOB is a chartered civil engineer, and professional certified coach at DSA Building Performance.