When I sit with leadership teams early in the year, I often observe two conversations happening at once.
There’s the visible one—goals, priorities, plans. And then there’s the quieter one, happening beneath the surface. The issues no one quite names. The tensions people assume will resolve themselves once things get busy.
When I work with executive teams, the greatest challenges almost always come back to people, even when the strategy and process are solid. Over and over, I see that how individuals show up for each other determines the speed, the trust, and the overall health of the team. One framework that consistently makes a meaningful difference is Patrick Lencioni’s Ideal Team Player model: Humble, Hungry and Smart.
The most strategic advantage you have right now is your willingness to be wrong. This is the new paradox of leadership. We’ve all been trained to believe that the right decision requires perfect information, yet volatility has stripped that certainty away. Markets shift overnight, teams restructure faster than the org chart, and data seems to contradict itself weekly. The leaders who win aren’t the ones chasing certainty. They are the ones who have mastered the art of deciding in the dark.
Every executive team I coach works hard to align on strategy. They debate priorities, refine ROCKS (quarterly priorities), and finally walk out of the room confident they’ve nailed it.
Yet a few months in, progress feels uneven. Teams are stuck in old habits. Projects stall. Strategy looks great on paper, but it isn’t fully alive in day-to-day work.
As business leaders, we want to recruit and retain the best and brightest team members to execute on our strategic vision. But are we looking at the right factors when building our executive leadership team? Do we really know what makes great leaders in today’s environment?
I’ve worked with leadership teams throughout my career — from building great, highly effective teams at Shelter Mortgage to all the companies I work with in my current role as a Strategic Business Coach. I’ve noticed five common traits in the most successful executive teams, and I share them below as the “Secrets of a Genuine Leader.”
Could your team make it to the Final Four?
It’s March Madness, and I can’t help but draw parallels between the teams on the basketball floor and the executive teams I see in the business world. They both operate off the same set of basic principles:
1. Get the basics right. Know your core values and stay true to them. Stay positive and work together on shared goals instead of personal, isolated goals. You can’t win the game alone.
Apple, REI, Walt Disney, Nordstrom, Starbucks…
When you walk into any of these businesses you immediately feel their company culture. It hits you the moment you step inside. It’s in the way their team members greet you, their level of service and the subtle behaviors you might not even notice.
All of these companies take their cultures seriously. They make trust, transparency, respect and pride all non-negotiable, and these qualities get mirrored in their customer-facing interactions.
As we enter 2018 and all the promise a fresh year brings, it’s the perfect time for leaders to develop their company’s Vivid Vision.
What’s a Vivid Vision? Cameron Herold, the former COO of 1-800-Got-Junk who increased revenues from $2 million to $105 million in 6 years, describes it in his book Double Double. It’s painting a picture of what your business will look, feel and act like three years down the road. It’s not about how you will get there with defined goals and metrics — we’ll save that for the strategic planning sessions with your leadership team. It’s imagining where you want your company to be in three years. To communicate this picture, you’ll need to envision success and provide ample details, using expressive language.
One of the biggest — and most common — pitfalls in business is a lack of accountability. You can have a rock-solid strategic plan with clear areas of responsibility and measurable metrics, but if you don’t hold each other accountable, you won’t reach your goals.
If that sounds like your team, you’re not alone. I uncover accountability issues in many of the teams I work with, including some who are otherwise highly functional. The good news: It’s a relatively easy fix if you’re not afraid to say “the buck stops here”, “you can’t blame others” or “it’s your issue.”
