We live in a world and in a time that rewards companies that are agile, innovative, and capable of executing a clear, powerful vision. Your leadership team’s effectiveness will determine your success and whether your company can establish and maintain a sustainable competitive advantage.<\/p>\n
The signs that your team is getting stale might not be a lack of enthusiasm or commitment. It might be that people are not clear what to feel committed to, and their enthusiasm is misplaced and misaligned. The tell-tale sign that you must do something is when mediocrity takes hold. And if you fail to arrest the rate of decline, it isn’t long before dysfunction sets in, and then failure usually follows.<\/p>\n
When you get comfortable, you stop growing and pushing and instead increasingly accept the status quo.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
When you get comfortable, you stop growing and pushing and instead increasingly accept the status quo. The problem is stagnation: when organizations stop challenging themselves to elevate their performance, they lose their competitive edge. Invariably competition cuts through and exposes the vulnerabilities that you could have and needed to shore up.<\/p>\n
Stagnation always leads to entropy, and the root cause isn’t that others have pulled ahead; it’s that you have allowed them to overtake by not keeping up. It is what happens when a company’s leadership team operates without a sense of urgency and gets stuck in a rut formed by your past successes. Noah Harari, the late professor from San Francisco State University and author of the best-seller, “The Leadership Secrets of Collin Powell,” noted that the surest predictor of a company’s failure is its recent success. Complacency combined with notoriety is deadly. It is like blood in the water: you are unlikely to outmaneuver the sharks on your trail.<\/p>\n
Optimizing your team is not about invigorating their thinking or ringing alarm bells to wake them up. To elevate others’ performance, you must first look to how you must elevate your own performance as a leader. It is your responsibility to ensure that the people responsible for driving your business are themselves effective leaders, which requires that you make yourself first into a fully competent leader.<\/p>\n
It doesn’t take much effort for seasoned managers to ensure that things move smoothly. But getting their people aligned and working effectively together requires practiced leadership.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Things you manage change over time. You are wise to keep up with innovations that might propel you further and faster forward into the future. But companies can often adapt and excel by being masterful at using what they have and avoiding the temptation to chase shiny objects. Allowing yourself to become distracted by new technologies and resources can easily cause you to lose focus and leads to mediocrity or worse. New tools only serve people who master how to employ them: their hands are always more important than the tool.<\/p>\n
People, though, are perpetually dynamic. They are affected by changes in their environment, the things they are thinking about, the explainable and inexplicable things that impact their mood and the pushes and pulls of things they grow better at doing, and the things that they become less capable of. You cannot manage people, not only because they are complex but because there is an implicit element of free will in our nature that inanimate things do not have. It is possible to lead people effectively, but even that is not a given.<\/p>\n
To be an effective leader, you must have the right mix of competencies and qualities that attract those you need to have follow you. And you need followers with the necessary competencies and interest in following. Peter Drucker would say that the only requirement of being a leader is having at least one willing follower, but that follower must also be capable of following your lead. Unfortunately, some people choose to be incompetent and those who simply do not have the means to be otherwise. People need to be both capable and willing to follow you.<\/p>\n
Organizations thrive under the guidance and inspiration of a high-performing leadership team.<\/h3>\n
Again, citing Oren Harari, “Leadership is the art of accomplishing more than the science of management says is possible.” It is critical to bear in mind that it is the success of the organization that makes the leaders successful. It is the responsibility, and the commitment of leaders to the development of the organization that unleashes the collective potential, but the performance of the people in your organization will determine whether or not your performance as a leader is suitable, sufficient \u2013 or ultimately sustainable.<\/p>\n
For your organization to thrive, you must develop and nurture leaders who will, in turn, lead others by ensuring that they serve and instill a sense of self-leadership within those in their charge. Great leaders are those who develop great leaders that extend the vision and sense of purpose needed to accomplish more of what matters.<\/p>\n
Refreshing your leadership team begins with evaluating the organization’s total performance and determining where you are falling short and need most to improve. That part is pretty obvious. But it also means looking at where you are doing well and challenging yourselves to do even better. This is how you combat complacency.<\/p>\n
Refreshing your leadership team begins with evaluating the organization’s total performance and determining where you are falling short and need most to improve.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
High-performance organizations understand that leadership really is an art and that the pinnacle of performance is a constantly moving target. The pursuit of exceptionalism is bound to the idea of virtuosity, not excellence. Virtuosity speaks to virtue and an abiding sense of morality and purpose. Virtuosity is always a pursuit driven by a persistent, latent dissatisfaction that makes it impossible to fall into complacency or retreat into your comfort zone for a snooze. High-performing leadership teams use their pursuit of virtuosity to stamp out mediocrity and agitate the status to prevent and even obviate dysfunction. They can, and they do this because they challenge themselves and set the standard for others looking for guidance.<\/p>\n
Refreshing your leadership team is about being a learning organization. You cannot build leaders by offering team-building, sending them to classes, or demanding fealty. People develop themselves into better leaders by first learning how to develop themselves into better, more effective people. It is a learning process that requires that you insist on curiosity by demonstrating your commitment to living in the learning mode \u2013 and resisting operating in the knowing-mode.<\/p>\n
Curiosity may be infectious, but plenty of people are immune<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Curiosity may be infectious, but plenty of people are immune \u2013 or highly resistant. You need learners. The challenges facing contemporary enterprises demand creative leadership. Reactive, command-and-control fails in the face of the volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity that define the conditions that most problems fester and opportunities remain hidden.<\/p>\n
You must nurture those who are willing to stretch \u2013 and replace those who either cannot or will not embrace the natural discomfort that comes with being curious. Doing so involves showing that you are vulnerable and willing to be proven wrong. You demonstrate the strength of your character when you admit that you do not have the answers and have the courage to face the unknown \u2013 and will not ask anyone to do anything you would not do yourself.<\/p>\n
Your job is to encourage curiosity. To do this, you must make it necessary for people to get comfortable being uncomfortable and make sure that they know it is safe to own up to the mistakes they invariably make when testing new ideas. You have to demonstrate vulnerability, reward ingenuity, and creativity and allow people to make mistakes \u2013 as long as they are conscientious, own the problems they create, and clean up the messes they make.<\/p>\n
If it seems daunting to find such people, you are right. You must attract them by creating an environment where competent people want to contribute what they have to offer and accomplish things that they find significant and meaningful. High performers run from mediocrity and seek out opportunities to experience extreme satisfaction in what they do. Beyond attracting the people you need, you are also at risk of losing the high performers on your team that are underutilized or do not feel challenged. You are literally robbing them of the joy they would find in the things they are capable of accomplishing.<\/p>\n
Refreshing your leadership team involves risk. Whenever you challenge people to grow, and especially when you replace people, you expose your own incompetence.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Refreshing your leadership team involves risk. Whenever you challenge people to grow, and especially when you replace people, you expose your own incompetence.Even with exceptional leadership skills, developing people and making competent organizations always involves uncertain outcomes. But complacency, tolerating incompetence, and allowing dysfunction to erode the performance of your organization raises the risk that your company may become irrelevant and even face extinction.<\/p>\n
Your investment in the performance leadership team is a value multiplier. There are very few things that will compete with the return on your investment. Everything else you invest in is either enhanced or constrained by the performance of the leaders in your organization. It is why investing in refreshing your leadership team is the best investment you can make right now.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
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