Number One Team

Most companies think they have a leadership team.

But they don't.

They have a bunch of leaders reporting to the CEO, but they're not a team.

Each leader thinks they're doing the right thing by optimizing their function: sales, optimizing for sales, marketing, optimizing for marketing, service, optimizing for service, but that actually causes dysfunction and silos throughout the organization.

Sales focuses on selling, whether or not service can support it. Marketing focuses on bringing in more leads, even if sales doesn't have the bandwidth to follow through on all those leads, and purchasing optimizes gross margin on products your clients don't want or don't need.

For members of a leadership team. The leadership team needs to be the number one team.

For example, that means the number one loyalty the VP of sales has is to the leadership team, not the sales team.

That's a tough ask.

Each leader probably spends the most time with his or her functional team, the sales team, the marketing team, the operations team, etc. So it's natural to have the most loyalty towards that team.

When I work with leadership team, teams that take some time to create.

I recently started working with a leadership team that had only been together as a team for four months. It's only natural, they wouldn't feel that kind of loyalty yet.

So here's what we're doing to create it overtime.

First, we've created a frequent and discipline meeting rhythm for the leadership team, and it includes daily huddles, weekly accountability meetings, monthly check ins, quarterly planning sessions and annual planning sessions. The more the leadership team works together, the more they'll feel like a real team.

Second, we've created three ground rules that dictate how the team behaves towards each other. These ground rules are meant to create a safe space for building trust, vulnerability, and having difficult conversations.

The first ground rule is brutal honesty. Say it, especially when it's difficult.

The second ground rule is no shame, no blame. When we're being brutally honest, we're not doing it to gang up on anyone or make them feel bad. We're doing it, so we can improve moving forward.

And the third ground rule is called disagree and commit. This means after good honest conflict or everyone's had a chance to be heard, a decision is made. Once the decision is made, all members of the team are fully committed to executing on that decision as if it was their own.

Is your leadership team the number one team? If not, what are you doing to get there? If it already is, what are you doing to make sure it stays that way?