Building Leadership Teams That Get Results

Kristen: Welcome to Love and Leadership, the podcast that helps you lead with both your head and your heart, plus a bit of humor. I'm Kristen Brun Sharkey, a leadership coach and facilitator.

Mike: And I'm Mike Sharkey, a senior living and hospitality executive. We're a couple of leadership nerds who also happen to be a couple.

Kristen: Join us each week as we share our unfiltered opinions, break down influential books, and interview inspiring guests.

Mike: Whether you're a seasoned executive or a rising star, we're here to help you level up your leadership game and amplify your impact.



Kristen: Hello and welcome back to Love and Leadership. I'm Kristen

Mike: I'm Mike.

Kristen: And today we are going to be talking about effective leadership teams,

Mike: I thought we changed the name of our podcast.

Kristen: Oh, I'm sorry, it's Love and Leadership and Cats

Mike: Yes, Love and Leadership and Cats.

Kristen: Yeah.

Mike: Cats don't display much leadership.

They're very independent.

Kristen: Yeah. They pretty much just do whatever they want.

Mike: Which is, reverse apropos to what we're talking about today.

Kristen: We have a very cute sleeping cat nearby.

Mike: Pretty cute.

Kristen: Yeah. Okay. We'll, try to post more pictures to support the new title of the podcast.

Mike: Love and leadership and cats.

Kristen: Yes. Well,

Mike: Well,

Kristen: So before we jump into the topic, do you have any leadership moments for this week?

Mike: Well, yes. I guess this week's leadership discussion is all about teams.So my leadership moments really related to my current team.

I am changing jobs. We are probably moving, not too far, but far enough that, it's just a lot of goodbyes and really looking at the connection and the progress we've made. And they're pretty sad to see me go, which is both a little heartbreaking, but at the same time, I won't say it feels good, but it's like, I'm happy that,that all the things that I've learned and been able to share have made some type of impact.

And, uh, you know, good teams, they should get very close, right? You're in the, you're in the trenches, so to speak. And I always experienced that, especially working in restaurants and kitchens, go through a lot of hard times together and, and persevere and keep moving forward to personal goals and team goals.

And nowadays, there's a lot of movement in companies and positions and that doesn't always sit real well with me, someone who doesn't love change. But I guess that's a leadership moment. Like you have to learn how to do that. And, they have a leadership conundrum too.

They have to adjust to a new environment. new boss, new director, and that's not easy. That's a skill, right? And I'm sure we'll do that The First 90 Days at some point.

Kristen: I

Mike: those are skills to learn. But, I'm pretty sad. It's been a great team. We've gotten very close. And, I'm sorry to leave them.

Kristen: Yeah. Anyway, For me, I didn't really prepare one this week

Mike: Yeah, yeah.

Kristen: once. But I, yeah, I think I've been thinking a lot about self compassion lately for various reasons that I'm going to be vague about for now, but I've had to kind of learn to show some compassion towards myself and, it's a good learning in that because it's often just so much easier to show that to other people than it is to ourselves, as we've talked about in various episodes.

So, I guess just a reminder for anybody who needs to hear that right now. As we're coming up in the last like final few weeks of the year,

take that time to be kind to yourself, even though it's really hard sometimes.

Mike: Yeah. And your professional success does not equal your value as a human being. And those are often conflated. And for me especially, I think we all have values as human beings that, that is not reflective of what we produce or how productive we are or what our salary is. And that is important to remember that.

Kristen: Yes, definitely. Even if it's challenging sometimes.

Mike: Challenging.

Kristen: By sometimes, I mean like always, you know,

Mike: I think there's a lot of high achievers that like, if you're not actively achieving 24 hours a day, you feel like you're,you're not getting it done. And it's like, I can't even sleep. Allowing yourself to rest. Even normal sleep can be hard for people and certainly taking time off, not just vacation, but like,You don't have to be like now, especially I think in America, we're so wired in, we're on our phones 24 seven.

We're answering emails 24 seven. I keep seeing these memes that like, European office in August, like if you email them, the out of office email is like, you know, I'm on vacation. For the rest of August, don't email me. We won't answer and Meanwhile, the American out of office is like I'm sorry, you know, I'm out of the office from 4 to 7 p. m Today to have a kidney transplant, but you can reach me on my cell phone at any time

Kristen: my cell phone at

Mike: You know, we're not just yeah

Kristen: I'm sorry if my response is delayed by 15 minutes.

Mike: Right Undergoing major surgery, but I will get back to you very soon. Okay, you know You I don't know. It's, we've created a weird system, you gotta exist in it, but you gotta be compassionate to yourself. Do things other than work or there's even that, you know, I like words, right?

We talked about that and the word recreation if you break it down it is recreation. So I think there's some profundity and in profundity in that and I'm still exploring that. But analytics and numbers are not the only uh thing that will help you progress on the path, so recreate.

Kristen: Yeah. It's a good time of year to be thinking about these things. And I'm actually excited. We are going to air an episode on Christmas Day, which we expect that most people will probably not listen to on Christmas Day, but, um, going to be talking about doing an annual review for yourself and preparing for your, not that kind of the annual review.

Mike: Is it my performance review?

Kristen: Not a performance review

Mike: didn't prepare.

Kristen: Not like the kind of thing you would do for work, that's required by HR, but more an opportunity to kind of reflect and, prepare for, so it's a good time of year for that.

So, Well, jumping into today's topic, which is talking all about teams, especially leadership teams. And what prompted this episode, so I've been finishing up a program through Brown University, and ACT Leadership. I think I've mentioned it on the podcast once or twice. Sorry, one of our cats is just walking all over the other one right now, so.

Love and 

Mike: cats. Love and 

Kristen: leadership 

Mike: in cats. 

Kristen: and Cats. Anyway, so this program is on team coaching. It's a team coaching credential program. I've just been wrapping up the final pieces of it. And as part of that, I wanted to do an episode, talking about more about teams.This is kind of a mini LBC episode because a lot of what I'm going to be talking about is pulling from a book called Senior Leadership Teams, What It Takes to Make Them Great by Ruth Wageman, Richard Hackman, there's a couple other authors, they're all like Harvard researchers, I believe.

So I'm going to get into kind of some of that, but starting off with what is a team? So there's a lot of definitions of that, but I like the one, a collective of people who not only share a common goal, but are interdependent in order to achieve it.

Mike: So just to be clear, we're not talking about Microsoft Teams. Because that's traumatic. Oh

Kristen: God, no, no, no. I will never, I will never . One of, one of the benefits of working for yourself is you never need to use voluntarily use Microsoft product.

Mike: I mean, I guess

Kristen: I mean, I guess sometimes, like, I, clients use it, but whatever. For my own business, I will never use it.

Mike: I mean, Excel is wonderful. Excel.

Kristen: Yeah. Yeah.

Mike: But the rest

Kristen: Teams is yeah. No. Yes. We were talking about teams of people,

Mike: And that software. Okay. Copy that. All right.

Kristen: So yeah, so that's a team. And then team coaching is a process that helps a team improve their skills and the way they work together ultimately to help them to achieve that common goal and purpose.

So this is a little bit different, from individual coaching, which is going to be obviously like on a one on one basis. The biggest thing here is like when you're talking about coaching a team, you're coaching the team as a whole. So you're not coaching like the leader as a different level than the rest of the team, right?

You're not coaching individuals on the team. You're coaching the team like as a single entity. And a lot of the work that's happening as a team coach is you're listening at what my program calls the L4 level. So I've talked about, I use three levels of listening and my own work and the things I talk about, right?

And as do they, and they talk about L4 is actually the fourth level where, which is, you're actually sensing like the team's energy. You're listening to what's happening with the team, right? And if you've ever been in a meeting where you've just sensed this really thick tension, right?

Like, that's L4 energy, right? So that's what you're doing as a team coach is you're really listening to that emergent team energy and it's really focused on like how the team is working together as opposed to what they're working on and like their relationship to their topics as opposed to just like the specifics of what they're doing, right?The team completely retains ownership of their own growth, results, agenda, everything. So the coaching is really about optimizing how they work together.

Mike: And it can include a lot of foundational work, which is a lot of that's going to be like the development of a team charter, so this is things like vision and purpose, values, norms, goals and measures, and so forth.

Kristen: And then also like helping a team develop skills in terms of how they communicate and work together. 

Mike: And then there's also baked into this is this 60 30 10 rule of team effectiveness. This is from Ruth Wageman and Richard Hackman, who are also two of the authors of the, this book. But this is basically saying 60 percent of a team's effectiveness is attributable to like the pre work that happens before the team is formed, or before it's relaunched, if you're doing a re relaunch of a team, like that work that goes into who is on the team, the purpose, the structure, et cetera, is 60 percent of a team success.

Kristen: And then 30 percent of it is about what you actually do during that launch or relaunch process. So for example, developing like a team charter and having very clear norms and the ways that you work together. And then 10 percent is from like the more hands on coaching that actually happens once the team is alreadyin process. So,really, that's a theme of this is thinking about like the setup of a team is everything really.

Mike: As you say that I'm thinking about how we work in the kitchen. And, how you set up your mise en place is really determinant on how successful of a service you're going to have.

It's more important than the service itself. If you set up well, if you prepare well, you know, that's the prep, right? And that's the 60 percent and you can change the course of your career by optimizing that. Yeah.

Kristen: Yeah. For sure. I think that's a good analogy.

Mike: For sure. I think that's a good analogy. The criteria that you use.

Cause I'm reading Simon Sinek's, Start With Why right now. And it's pretty profound.

Kristen: This is our next episode.

Mike: Yeah. And he's really talking about not just customers, right? But the customers buy what you, why you do it, not what you do, not how you do it. And he's just really big on Apple because Apple very well explains their why.

Their why is they challenge the status quo. They reinvent, they challenge the status quo. That's the why. How they do it, And what they do to do it are far secondary to the why of it. And do they make computers? Sure. Yes, they do. Is it appreciably better than, PCs maybe in some ways, but not in every way, and you have detractors and, but he brought up something where Apple's advertising is always one person.

It's never a group because they're marketing to people who share their why. They want to be individual and iconoclasts and breaking the norm and rebel. And one of the reasons they're so successful is their why is so powerful and they hire people that share that why, and when people share your, why they will turn down better offers, more money, more benefits from a competitor because the alignment is not there. So this to me is pretty, pretty profound and I'm really going to take it forward as I like hire and build teams in the future. And I already had the idea, like you don't just hire for skills, right?

You hire for attitude, but finding people that share your, why that's 60%. And if you get that, the rest is going to fall into place. 

Kristen: Yeah. I think you'll like a couple of the things in the, what we're moving into now for that too, which is the,

Mike: It's just, it's funny how everything just fits together too, like It does.

Yes, that's definitely a theme on our podcast.

Kristen: It all overlaps.

Mike: Oh. Okay.

Kristen: So the six conditions for team effectiveness. This is the bulk of this book, the Senior Leadership Teams. And I really like it. This is based on a bunch of research that they did on, what makes outstanding teams outstanding, and it really came down to these six core conditions for a team's success.

And this is really focused on leadership teams, especially senior leadership, like executive leadership teams. 

But I think it applies to many types of teams. I think the core setup stuff remains true, honestly. So these six conditions are broken down into three essential conditions. And these are like the basic prerequisites for good team performance.

And then three enabling conditions, which will smooth the path to excellence and accelerate a team's movement down that path. So the first of the three, essential conditions is a real team. And they spent some time in the book talking about like, do you need a real team? Because I think we tend to assume that a team is just like a, your direct reports are a team, right?

But the way a lot of people run their teams is not actually functioning as a team. 

Basically, there's like a lot of change or complexity or growth happening, which I think describes most companies and situations at this point. You do need an actual real team. Where maybe you don't need a like a true team if you have like a holding company and like so the executive team where they're really like running completely autonomously like maybe you don't need a real team but in other situations you probably need a team. And there's four types of teams. So there's informational teams. So these are exchanging important information about various areas of the business.

They're gathering intelligence that might be useful to other parts of the organization, and then they meet regularly to hear direction and initiatives from the CEO. I think this is what a lot of direct report teams default to is this kind of informational team. Then a consultative team is basically you're periodically bringing people together to advise about like specific key decisions that you need to make.

They're not actually making the decision is the key with this, but they're acting as a sounding board, they're helping provide information, think through decisions. And then coordinating teams are where members come together to coordinate their leadership activities as they execute strategically important initiatives.

So, for example, if you have a company that's expanding into like a new product line, or a new geography, or they're considering making their team remote, like these are all like areas where you're probably going to be bringing together leaders from a group of functions and they have this like very interdependent shared purpose that they're working towards that goes beyond just like their reporting structure. And then finally you have decision making teams. So, these are actually teams that are making these, small number of really critically important decisions that are going to be most consequential for the organization. And these are the most complex in terms of how they run, and they're also probably the most valuable. And then it gets into like these three characteristics of a real leadership team. So real leadership teams are interdependent. So that means they share responsibility for achieving a collective purpose. People are still responsible for their individual roles. So,if you have responsibility for a particular department, you still have that responsibility, but they also work together, they rely on each other, and they use each other's experience, energy, and expertise in order to accomplish a collective goal.

And to create interdependent teams, you must insist that team members make decisions collectively on behalf of the entire organization, rather than just simply putting their own interests ahead, which I think is a key differentiator. There's a lot throughout this book talking about like, when you're talking about leadership teams, like you need people who actually see themselves as leaders of the organization, not just leaders of their individual areas.

That's key. That's problematic,Yeah.

Mike: Jocko has a whole chapter about that. Sorry to bring it back to that. Um, but, Yeah,

Kristen: Every, every episode comes to Jocko.

Mike: It's how Navy SEALs lead and win. Okay. But he has a really good point. It's if you don't, if you have different departments or some, a lot of companies now they have different divisions or they're really different companies under a parent company, they're required to work together.

And buy each other's services or products and they're not reporting to the same people. It can be very difficult to get everyone's goals aligned. And to see the different perspectives from where people are coming from. I think that's really interesting. We have that in hotels. You know, like housekeeping and the front desk have different agendasat times. And it's up to the leadership team to really clarify what the agenda is supposed to be and what the actual objective is, and and.

Everybody wants to be the star, right? Everybody wants to be the big contributor. I think not everyone, they won't, not everyone wants attention, but everyone wants to be, important.

Everyone wants to feel important and being able to be like, well, I mean, it's like an orchestra, right? Like I can tell you when I was a percussionist, I thought every note I played was the most important and usually it was not, you know, but, uh, you have to know who's the soul of what

Kristen: What was it? Mahler's Mahler 5 or something. Is that like the big important like?

Mike: The, the hammer blows of fate.

no, that's Mahler 6. But Mahler five has more, five has a four based room. I mean, there was a period that I was the loudest musician on the face of the planet, for sure, for sure. And I made, at one point, the entire Vienna Philharmonic turn around in absolute, shock and, just shock that I was playing.

And god bless him Christoph Eschenbach wanted more. And he just, he looked at the orchestra and he goes, it's okay. He has crescendo. I was like, you're a bad mother. But yeah, I love that guy. But you, it's, it's like that, right? You have to know which voice is the leading voice. And sometimes you're a supporting voice and sometimes, and being able to, like, I was not able to do that as a musician.

But that's key for harmony,

Kristen: Yeah. An orchestra is the perfect example. Like the interdependency is so critical.

Yeah, there's also a lot of egos,

Mike: It's so much ego. It's so hard. You know, everybody's trying to over, and they're all like world class musicians and it would actually be better if they didn't do that. And when you find orchestras, and I would say, there are orchestras like the Cleveland Orchestra that actually have more of a team ego and their ego is about being the best most cohesive sounding orchestra on the planet. And that's what they do. They play, they have the best ensemble work. They play together the best there, articulate the best together. and that's their ego. It's not like, oh, I'm the principal flute. I want to be, no, that's how they play together. And that's what they're known for.

And like Chicago Brass is like that. They're like, we're the loudest brass band on the planet. And they have to work together to make that. So that's, that's an interesting concept. Like how can you get your team's ego to be based on the team success and not the inter department or, the individual success.

That's a good conductor, right? 

Kristen: Yeah. Interdependency.

Mike: I don't know why I'm thinking about music lately, but

Kristen: I mean, it makes a good

Mike: it's a good analogy.

Kristen: For a lot of this stuff, right?

Yeah.

Yeah. So I guess, yeah, continuing with the orchestra analogy.

Mike: I'm sorry. Did you think this was gonna be a short episode,

Kristen: This,

Mike: This green tea just kicked in. Oh no. We're caffeinated now.

Can have some of yours? I don't think you're gonna drink it all. Oh,

Kristen: Oh, did you just pound your green tea

Mike: It's not pound. I would, I just need more, Fine

Kristen: You can have some

Mike: I'm just gonna take a sip, 

Kristen: Yeah. Okay. 

Mike: This is what happens when you record in the dusk of the December. We're almost at the longest day of the year.

Kristen: Oh my

Mike: Oh it feels like the nights are We're feelin

Kristen: it. We're feeling

Mike: it. Days are so short.

Kristen: Okay, so anyway, that was a beautiful segue that you then, took away with the green tea, but

Mike: Wow, harsh.

Kristen: So moving forward with the orchestra analogy

Mike: So interdependency is one of the three like real leadership teams are also bounded. So leadership teams know who is on the team and who is not. And everybody else also knows who is on the team and who is not. This is really interesting because they did the research that supported this book.

Kristen: They actually showed that less than 7 percent of the teams that they researched agreed on who was actually on the team. They had like wildly different, often wildly different ideas of who was included in the team membership.

Mike: This outline from this book feels very Harvard. It

Kristen: It is, yeah, it's Harvard Business Press.

Mike: So intelligent and so like broken down and well researched and like it's great, holy,

Kristen: Yeah, for sure.

Mike: Because Harvard, okay,

Kristen: But yeah, so I think that is really interesting, right? So like making it clear who's on the team, like you think about an orchestra, it's extremely clear who is on the orchestra and who is playing what part.

Mike: Yeah, but you know what,

You have the librarian, you have the travel coordinator, you have the but, no, I'm not trying to be contrarian. I'm saying like, some people will think, some people have an ego and say only the musicians are on the team.

Yeah, there's also the, yeah, it's also an organization in itself, 

But the librarian is a very highly paid and difficult position. And that, if you have a good librarian, It makes a tremendous difference in the success of the orchestra because they put in bowings. They interpret conductor's notes before the first rehearsal.

They play a huge, you're arrogant like French horn player might be like, he's not part of the team. So I don't know.

Kristen: know. Yeah. Okay. Welllet's roll with it.

Mike: Yeah, sure.

Kristen: So yeah, so that is one thing, especially if your team is of the, we talked about the four types of teams. If your team is a coordinating or decision making team, especially you need to have clear boundaries of who is on the team in order to develop a shared identity and that like sense of purpose.

So bounded and then also stable because and with stable, I mean, this is all within the context of the modern workplace, right? But membership that's stable enough for members to get to know one another, and like their special strengths and limitations and learn how to work together well as a team.

Andagain, think about back to an orchestra. I would say there's a lot of stability in a symphony

Mike: There can be. Yeah. They'll be there for decades.

Kristen: People will be there until they retire. So that, that contributes a lot.

Mike: Not always, that's like my leadership moment. I'm like, it takes a year to get to really know people. And then, a lot of executive positions, they don't last more than two years now.

If you look at really high level C suite people on LinkedIn, it's like two years, three months. Two years, one month. Two years, four months. And that's kind of the tenure of, and it's really hard to get to know people.

Kristen: Yeah. And that's a big challenge for team stability is a huge challenge in the modern world, right? But I like that one thing this book says is that like leaders of outstanding teams use their power and their political acumen to minimize the disruptive effects of membership changes.

So like doing kind of whatever it takes to help keep the membership as stable as possible and like when there are changes doing that in a way that's it's kind of like paying respect to, people who are leaving and so forth. So I do think that's, that was an interesting

Mike: That's what Tushar was talking about right, VUCA right? You have to develop that skill. You know early in my and still it does but early in my career whenever we would have a director change It would be a meltdown and it's frustrating and it can take time to find somebody and you might go for weeks or months that have an open position. And you have to learn to like, navigate that in between time, both with yourself and with your team, and not be overreactive to it.

And that's all, that's a whole skill, the VUCA,

Kristen: skill that Yeah

Mike: VUCA management.

Kristen: for sure. So

Mike: sure.

Kristen: So that's the first condition, which is a real team. So the number two is a clear, compelling purpose. And there's these three C's, they don't call it the three C's, but I do, of like a, what a team's purpose needs to be. So consequential. So thinking about, what actions are actually, critical enough to be treated as, the main job of the leaders and not just have their membership of this team just be, like, a side project that they do once their main role is done.

Mike: Challenging.

Kristen: So what is this team of leaders up for at this point in its life? And clear. What are the critical few things that only this team of leaders can accomplish? And a couple things on the challenging that were interesting. They say that leaders frequently over challenge individual members, but under challenge the team as a whole, which I think is interesting.

Mike: That's interesting.

Kristen: Yeah, like putting too much on individuals, but not expecting enough of them in terms of how they actually perform and work as a team. And challenge without clarity is, this is super important, will hurt performance. Like the clarity is the hardest part of that. And they provide a process in the book for actually clarifying the purpose, and this kind of goes around, first identifying, like, what are the interdependencies of the team, what are the functions that actually require, everybody to be at the table in order to accomplish it, creating a list of, actions and decisions you want the team to achieve, and looking at, like, what are the, really the mission critical things that can only be done by this team, and then, basically, turning that into a purpose that you are communicating to the team and you as the leader are owning, but everybody has to be bought into ultimately. And then number three is the right people. So we're talking about like team membership with this, right?And this is again, interesting because I think often teams are just looked at by reporting structure or just default by reporting structure. But what this talks about is like, don't just select people by position or title because they need to actually bring the essential competencies that are needed to work as a real leadership team.

So some of the things to look for when you're selecting members of a team. So first off, the core skills, experience, knowledge, representation of perspectives and functional or operational expertise that you need for the team to accomplish the work. So it's kind of, I think, the basics that most people think of.

But also the second one is going back to self image as an executive leader. So picking people who actually see themselves not just as a leader of their function, but as a leader for the organization and contributing to the organization as a whole. That's a pretty

Mike: That's some pretty high level thinking. Yeah. Yeah.

Kristen: For sure. But it is a difference.

And it is. And I've been in that role, right, where you start to transition from thinking about, the good of the organization, not just, the good of your individual function that you're responsible for.

Mike: Yeah, that's ideal. Oh.

Kristen: And then, not everybody on the team has to have conceptual thinking skills, but you need at least a couple people on the team, usually, who have good conceptual thinking skills. And this is the ability to synthesize complex information from,data, divergent sources and extract their implications for the organization.

So like pulling information from all these different places and being able to conceptualize like what that actually means, that is a particular skill set not everybody has, and you need to have that skill set on a good senior leadership team. And then the other two areas that I really like that they found were like actually the most important for predicting leadership team success.

One was empathy.

Mike: Huh.

Kristen: Yep. And they actually give like behaviors associated with these, which I really like. So that the three behaviors they associate with empathy are the ability to understand the content of what a person has just said. The ability to understand the meaning that it holds for the speaker and the ability to reflect back the feelings the speaker has attached to the content, which I like clarifying within those three behaviors. And then the other one that they found to be most important was integrity, and they're not just defining integrity as I don't believe in stealing, right? They actually, again, tie this to like specific behaviors that are associated with integrity and like lead to team success. So the ones they give are, putting enterprise affecting issues on the table, even when it could have negative implications for their area of responsibility. Keeping leadership team discussion confidential, like not engaging in gossip. Actually implementing decisions that are agreed upon. And holding the team accountable for making choices that are consistent with the team and organizational values that have been agreed upon.

Mike: So integrity is interesting, and I think it's misunderstood, and I'm not saying I understand it, but it bears a lot of discussion. It is not analogous to honesty.

Kristen: Correct. The word integrity is

Mike: Integrity is the same word as integer or integral and it means whole and integrate. I've seen some explorations of what this means both for you as like a person and how you become an integrated person.

Kristen: And, you know, I'm trying to remember the book I read on it. I think it was Henry Cloud. I think he has a book on integrity, so it's interesting. If you think of it later we can put it in the show notes.

Mike: Yeah, I can look it up. The word in Chinese though, I don't remember if the character looks like this or this, how they describe it, but it's the same as the joint of the bamboo and it's, that joint is incredibly hard and stable and it's like as hard to cut through a steel or something like it's a very, very, very, very solid.

So integrity is not just honesty. And there's a much more profound meaning. So interesting.

Kristen: Yeah, I think it was cool and I like these behaviors for defining like what it actually looks like. When you're doing team selection. And then the other part of this, because it's not just knowing who should be on your team, but also knowing who should not be on your team.

And sometimes when you need to remove somebody from your team, and they talk about watching out for derailers. And these are people who are generally going to be low in empathy and integrity, but there's also a couple of specific behaviors that they give to watch out for with people who are derailers.

The first is like a victim mentality. So if you ask them about their career, they're probably going to talk a lot about the situations where things were done to them. Things have tales of when they were badly treated when they're not really showing a lot of sense of responsibility for things that have happened in their career.

Mike: It's a lot of like, Oh, this happened to me. And the other is a tendency to make blanket negative assessments of other people. So these are like sweeping judgmental statements like, oh, he's a moron or she's a terrible manager. Like looking out for when people are making those sweeping negative statements like that is a red flag, which I completely agree with. I just, there's so many people that come to mind. I, this is, this is very Harvard. They very like scientifically broke it down, but this is a very accurate description of people who are on teams that they're not driving the same direction you're driving.

Kristen: Yep, and those are the people, they call them derailers, right? Because

Mike: That tracks.

Kristen: will derail you and you're achieving your mission if you don't remove

Mike: Yeah, super tracks.

Kristen: Yeah, I really what I love about this. And just, honestly, a lot of, everything with coaching in general is just so behavioral focused. And,anytime you can tie specific behaviors to this stuff, it just makes it so much easier to identify it.

Mike: Yeah, that's very smart. I mean, you don't want victim.

Kristen: like,

Mike: we've all had bad bosses and bad situations and maybe injustices and those are real, but if you want to move forward,you can sit with that and for a minute, and then you still have to figure out how to move forward.

Nobody's gonna do it for you.If you're lucky, you'll have a mentor, you'll have somebody to get feedback from, but it is ultimately like you have to have an internal drive.

Kristen: Yeah. And

Mike: And take responsibility for yourself, your career, your success, your happiness. I'm saying that as someone who has not achieved all of thosethings that, but I know that I'm not waiting for somebody else to do it for me, or, yeah. Yeah.

Kristen: So yeah, so that's the three essential conditions. You have a real team, a clear, compelling purpose, and the right people. So the other three, these enabling conditions, the first one is a sound structure.

And they define these three areas of structure. So the first is team tasks. This is like a team that is performing genuinely meaningful tasks together. So these are like concrete pieces of work, like,figuring out succession planning, moving into new geography, like things that are actually like meaningful work that the team is doing together as a whole.

The actual most important one is team norms.

And this is super important and I don't think this is talked about enough in, at least when I was in the corporate world, this did not come up really at all, but. Really creating these, this clear set of agreements, norms, you can call them different things. My coaching program calls them like CTR, like co creating the relationship.

But there's this, agreed upon list of shared expectations about team member behavior. So like these are the specific behaviors that are acceptable and not acceptable. And the team agreeing on that is incredibly important. And these can't just be like values. They actually need to be, like, specific behavioral rules to which the team agrees.

So this can be everything from, like, how the team makes decisions, looking at, like, how you communicate. And it's also important not to just have the norms on there, but also to have a clear process for, like, how it's called out when these are not being respected. And as a leader, especially, this kinda goes back to Boundaries for Leaders,

Mike: leaders, it's boundaries for

Kristen: Yeah. Whatever behavior the leader tolerates becomes part of the rules,

Mike: But I, I think it's, it's interesting that it's, it's so clear, right? We're reading all these books now that talk about values on a wall are meaningless without, and Tushar talked about that too. You know, if you can't action them, if, if

Kristen: Behaviors.

Mike: It's behaviors and, if your value is we care about people, that is actually meaningless unless you can translate it into an actionable behavior.

When face, for instance, when faced with the decision, we will always put our employees before our, customers. And that's something that the founder of Southwest did, right? And it's in, in, Start with Why. And he talks about that. And even though they're one of the most customer service focused organizations ever, they knew that they had to take care of their employees first before the customers and before the shareholders. Somebody challenged him, do you care about your employees more or your shareholder? And he says, that's actually a very easy question.

The employees come first because without them, there's no company. And if you care about them, they're going to do a good job and that will create your shareholder value, sir. Uh, that's not a conundrum at all. 

Yeah, we put this first, we do this, it's action.

What

Kristen: does it actually look

Mike: What does it, what does it look like?

Kristen: look like? Yeah, don't say you want a culture of accountability. What does it actually look like in behaviors and how people perform?

Mike: perform? And so we're going to rewrite everything, like when we see something that is not in line with our, our integrity, as we've defined it, we're going to discuss immediately.

Kristen: Something like that, anything, right? Yeah, and I, this is so powerful and they found this is like the number one thing that has the biggest impact for structure is having an agreed upon set of team norms.

Mike: Love it. Yeah, it's awesome.

Kristen: And then the other piece of that is team size. So like having the right number of people on the team and especially for decision making teams, smaller is better.

Mike: Yeah. But more than two, right? Which we know from decision. Yeah. It's gotta be at least three. You get two, you get a yin and yang

Kristen: With team coaching, we generally, we talk about between three and 12 people, but usually you're going to be somewhere more in that, five to seven range. Oh,

Mike: And if we follow Chinese cosmology, we'll want an odd number, not an even.

Kristen: Hmm, okay.

Mike: So those are the yang numbers and the even or the yin. Yeah. Three. Good. Four. Bad.

Kristen: Oh.

Mike: Yeah.

It kind of works, too, because if you have four, you can get, you can have a deadlocked decision. That's why the Supreme Court has an odd

Kristen: I mean, yeah, there's definitely value in having an odd number of people on a team. But, you

Mike: Asymmetry is, when all these, beautiful food plates nowadays, they don't plate in the center of the plate anymore. They do swooshes and swirls around the outside, and they use negative space, and I don't know. I think there's, that's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm just hungry. It's dinner time. Need a

I need a swoosh and a swirl of soy sauce or something. 

Kristen: Well, okay, structure. We're talking about, tasks, norms, and size.

Mike: Number five is supportive organizational context.. And this is like, what are all the supporting things that are going to help the team be successful and this often gets skipped. So the four types of organizational support that they found to be most critical are rewards.

So having reward strategies that recognize and reinforce the team members for delivering on the team's accountabilities. If you say that the work that the team is doing is important but people are only being rewarded based on the individual function work that they're doing, that's a problem, right? So looking at making sure you have an alignment with your reward systems for supporting what you want to see happening with this team. Incentivize what you want to drive for sure,

Kristen: Yes. Yep.

Mike: Napoleon said a soldier will fight hard and long for a piece of colored ribbon. Yeah, but it's not the colored ribbon.

It's the honor. It's the recognition. It's the, I will fight long and hard for a quarterly bonus. I don't know, but like everyone's motivated by

Kristen: people are, yeah, people are motivated by different things.

Mike: things. Yeah,

Kristen: So, yeah, gotta make sure your rewards match up with what you're actually trying to make happen,

Mike: happen And we like we incentivize salespeople based on their performance like they'll you know your salary, butthe more they sell the more they earn in general yeah

Kristen: yeah, so rewards is a big one. Information. So the outstanding teams take action to acquire the data that they need in the form that they need it for their special purposes.

So a lot of that is just making sure you have whether it's a dashboard or whatever it is, the information coming in that the team needs in order to make good decisions and to be successful. Education, like leaders of outstanding teams are always identifying, what did their teams not know, and investing time and money to provide the educational resources that make them smarter and more capable over time.

So, never letting go of the education and development of the team members, both individually and as a team, and the team capabilities. And then the last one is resources. So, these are like the basic materials for collaborative work. Things like providing ample time, space, staff support, like material resources.



Kristen: These are things that sound unimportant, but if you don't have them, then the team is not gonna be able to do successful work. And then number six is, for the six team conditions is expert team coaching. And they kind of get into, what team coaching is.

I won't get too much into that since we defined it earlier in the episode, but some times that they talk about are especially good for team coaching. So early stage. So this is the formation of a team. This is a really good time to create the energy and focus the team on its purpose. Midpoints.

So if you're at like the halfway point through a cycle meeting project, whatever it is, this is a good time to reflect on what's working and what's not. And then at the end point of a project or team, it's a really good time to reflect on what can the team learn from to position it in the best way possible for future battles that it's going to face. And they definitely do talk about the benefits of bringing in a third party for coaching the team. It can be very difficult to coach the team as a leader, unless you already have really worked to develop that skill set, but having somebody in to help the team get off on the right foot with coaching.

But one of the beauties of this is you can actually develop these skills and a good team coach is actually going to help people in the team develop the skills that they need in order to do this for each other. So the goal is to create a team that is ultimately like self managing in the long run.

Mike: I think that's smart.

It's yeah, it's a fresh perspective and you as the leader are part of the team, right? So it's hard to.

Kristen: It's hard to be objective.

Mike: I'll go back to a music analogy. I've almost never enjoyed a performance where the conductor is both playing the piano and conducting. Sorry, Leonard Bernstein.

You're great at both, but doing both, there's a reason those are two different positions. It never quite works for me. I don't know.

Kristen: Yeah, no, it's true.

it's very difficult to be objective, but it's definitely true. So yeah. So yeah, that's the episode.

Mike: episode. Cool. Um, I think it's fascinating. Like, the way you talk about it, a team has its own life and identity.It's an entity in and of itself, right? And when you started this program, I actually thought it was really interesting. It's not the same as coaching each individual on a team.

It's co, it's coaching the team as in an entirety, and then it probably includes the leader. You could not do that. I would love to have you coach my teams, and me, right? Like that would be very productive. I'll say, this is not a plug for your services, but it kind of is like, you know. 

Kristen: Yeah, it's very

Mike: It's very powerful. Yeah.

Kristen: I'm very excited. I've really enjoyed this program and team coaching is very new as a field. Um, very, very

Mike: I've never, I've never really heard it

Kristen: Yeah. I mean,

Mike: in this way. Yeah.

Kristen: The, the International Coaching Federation only created a credential for it like I think a year and a half ago. It's still very new.

But it's, it's very impactful.

Mike: As we know from your exploration of ADHD, you are an advanced being.

Kristen: Aw, thanks. So yeah, so I think that's our show for this week.

Mike: Sounds good.

Kristen: Thank you guys so much for listening again.

Mike: you so much.

Kristen: We will be back next week with Start With Why for Leadership Book Club.

Mike: I need to finish that. What's my, what's my why for finishing?

Kristen: Well, you know, we have a podcast we've committed to and that's why we're recording and on a Tuesday evening when it's kind of late and, um, dark outside and it's, but we are committed to you

Mike: I definitely should be committed. Anywho.

All right. Well, on that note, Thanks for listening everyone.

Kristen: All right. Thanks everybody.

The Love and Leadership Podcast is produced and co-hosted by me, Kristen Brun Sharkey and co-hosted by Mike Sharkey. Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts. We can't stress enough just how much these reviews help. You can follow us on LinkedIn under Kristen Brun Sharkey and Michael Sharkey, and on Instagram as loveleaderpod.

You can also find more information on our website, loveandleadershippod.com. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll see you again next week.