How do we bring to life the 7 Leadership Commitments discussed in last month’s blog to form this hypothetical “elite team”? 

I’m a huge fan of the Personal Histories exercise to help us build Trust and Respect.

According to Patrick Lencioni, with this exercise, we can build trust on our teams in less than 2 hours. Yes, you read that right. It’s not too good to be true and I’ll tell you WHY and HOW.

Regardless of industry, size, geography, or title, we are all impacted by the quality of our leadership, which directly relates to our ability to scale. We are unique in how we lead and what our end goals are, but we can find common ground through our desire to become better leaders.

Since we can all connect through leadership, let’s look at leadership through the lens of a former Navy SEAL…

Have you heard the saying: ‘People join companies, but they leave managers’? Maybe you’ve witnessed this and have seen A players leave your company. The most powerful vision will remain unachievable without great managers leading the way.

Are you set up for success next year? Have you achieved all your growth targets in this past year? And have you enjoyed the ride??

Executing on our strategy is a high priority, but a roadblock that can prevent effective implementation is a culture lacking accountability. We will not accomplish our goals or strategy without a strong culture of accountability in our teams. We all may have a different idea or understanding of accountability, so let’s align ourselves on the topic.

We’ve touched on the concept of the Working Genius in previous blogs (See: Trust. The Antidote to the Great Resignation and The 3 Questions to Build Your Dream Team), but we haven’t discussed the model in full detail and, frankly, it deserves its own spotlight. The Six Types of Working Genius is a very powerful assessment that, in my opinion, is superior to any personality test as it focuses on how on the natural talents within a team can enable us to get things done in the most productive way.

I get particularly excited when an opportunity arises for us to combine an important topic and a powerful exercise into one. In this case, I’m referring to employee engagement and the Flywheel Effect. For those of us who aren’t familiar, the Flywheel Effect, a term coined by author Jim Collins, describes the momentum gained from small wins that accumulate over time and generate growth and improvement. Each turn of our “flywheel” builds upon work done previously and when we stay focused on core concepts that power our flywheel it can lead to tremendous success.