"Pick your team with care, invest once you do." ~ Seth Godin
Photo Credit: Kevin Jordan, Bolinas Ridge Trail near Olema, CA at Pt. Reyes National Seashore.
Greetings -
I hope you, your families and friends are well!
October has been a whirlwind of work, travel and fun. I am writing this from my lovely hometown of Portland, OR, where I am spending time visiting with family, catching up with friends and seeing clients (and seasons!). Prior to my trip, we had the pleasure of hosting our intrepid daughter during her Fall school break. Between wonderful meals, a bit of golfing and lots of laughing, we could not have asked for a better visit. She continues to thrive and inspire.
Work is taking me up and down the West Coast, meeting with leadership teams and facilitating team offsites. Though varied in terms of industries and organizations, they recognize that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Teams aspire to collectively lead more deliberately and thoughtfully, putting a premium on the value of culture and a commitment to cultivating effective and sustainable work communities.
Diverse in content and sourcing, this edition provides looks at how and why teams both succeed and fail. The contributors offer an array of perspectives and insights. I hope you find applicability and benefit.
As always, happy reading and listening!
Be well, take good care of yourselves, families and community.
-kj
PS - (Missed a newsletter? Past editions can be found here: https://www.kevinjordan.coach/blog. And if you hit paywall on an article(s), feel free to send me a note and let me know what you need. I have subscriptions to many of the sources that I cite.)
Featured: Seth's Blog: Practical approaches for more effective teamwork.
Seth's list resonates, these in particular:
Give credit, take responsibility
Speak up clearly and generously
Make promises and keep them
Eagerly find someone more skilled than you to do a given piece of work
Find and offer dignity
Relentlessly seek better
With the rate of change unyielding and the ability to meaningfully thrive in uncertain environments challenged, teams can find themselves at significant inflection points. Current mental models and methods of working may no longer suffice. Behaviors and leadership attributes that previously guided successful work won't necessarily guarantee future results.
To effectively transform to meet both near and longer term organizational priorities, teams need to strategically evolve their connectivity of and support for each other. That evolution starts with each individual and coalesces into a shared commitment to value, trust, support and treat each team member as they would like to be treated.
Leaders who role model thoughtful questioning, active listening and instill a deep desire to learn and grow have the ability to create sustainable cultures that value our gifts and inspire us to bring the very best of ourselves every day. They create the conditions to achieve individual and team excellence, define measures of success, and provide the support necessary for us to flourish. Ultimately, they are intent on seeing each person as well as the collective for who we are and who we might become.
Articles
Harvard Business Review: New Rules for Teamwork. "Collaboration is more complex than ever—and more difficult to get right. Here’s how organizations can build better teams."
LinkedIn (Michael Watkins): Building Team Emotional Intelligence. "Team emotional intelligence (TEQ) is the shared emotional awareness and self-regulation in a team that contributes to deeper collaboration and higher performance. By building TEQ in your team, you create a psychologically safe environment in which team members feel comfortable taking risks and sharing ideas."
Harvard Business Review: Why Leadership Teams Fail. And what to do about it. "Admittedly, addressing dysfunction on your leadership team can be fraught, because it requires making hard choices about the people you work most closely with. But for that reason, it’s critical that you set aside your preferences and opinions and follow the kind of analytical approach that we recommend in this article—first diagnosing which specific pattern of dysfunction afflicts your team and then adopting a targeted approach to address it. Only then will you be able to lead a team that is capable of lifting your organization to a new performance level."
The Wall Street Journal: With ‘Founder Mode,’ Silicon Valley Makes Micromanaging Cool. "Hands-on leaders are hip; Steve Jobs and Elon Musk are seen as admirable examples."
CNBC: Companies that ‘prioritize work flexibility’ have the happiest workers, new ranking shows. "Indeed’s ranking found that companies with higher work wellbeing scores also have higher valuations, returns on assets and profits. Collectively, the companies on the list outperform stock market indexes including the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite, according to the report."
KelloggInsight: Employees See Bias in the Workplace. Their Bosses Don’t. "People in positions of power are often unable to see inequities in their own organizations—even if they see it elsewhere."
Blog Posts & Opinions
Atlassian: The State of Teams. "Work has changed. The way teams work together has to change too." (A great series of infographics and data on the state of teams, not the least of which: organizations lose 25 billion work hours per year due to ineffective collaboration. And I am sure Atlassian has some solutions for that :))
Korn Ferry: Why Gen Z is Saying No to Management. "It’s called 'conscious unbossing,' with seven in ten Gen Zers passing up better titles. How this is becoming a leadership problem."
Big Think: The “Peter Principle”: Why most companies are filled with people out of their depth. "Why would someone who has spent their entire career following orders become a great leader overnight?"
TED Talks + Podcasts
TED Radio Hour: Secrets to successful teamwork. "We all work in teams, from families, to companies, and everything in between. So what's the secret to doing it better?"
TED: WorkLife with Adam Grant: How to design teams that don’t suck. "Too many teams are less than the sum of their parts, and building a great team requires more than just picking an all-star roster or doing trust falls. Adam dives into the hard-hitting research on what makes teams work."
HBR IdeaCast: Dysfunctional Leadership Teams — and How to Fix Them. "CEOs get a ton of credit or blame for a company’s performance. But the entire leadership team is vital to success, and any dysfunction is often overlooked. Sometimes the CEOs leading them don’t even see that they’re not working. Thomas Keil...and Marianna Zangrillo's...research identifies three main types of failing leadership teams: shark tanks, petting zoos, and mediocracies. And they identify the pitfalls of each pattern and how to turn those teams around.
Arts, Music, Culture & Humor Corner
Big Think: How suicide warped David Foster Wallace’s legacy. "The writer’s tragic death at age 46 has led many to view him as a tortured artist. Here’s why this label is reductive."
The Guardian: ‘I never said I was going to retire ...’ Paul Simon on disability, drive and the mystery behind his greatest songs. "He halted his career after decades of hits, then a dream one night changed everything. From New York to swinging London and apartheid South Africa, he explains his epic journey."
The New Yorker: How Should We Create Things? "In a new documentary, the musician Brian Eno shows that playfulness can substitute for inspiration."
The New Yorker: Dear Parents. "Everyone is going to get pink eye eventually! And at Kinderkids Nursery School your child might even pick up a case of pirate’s gastroenteritis. Rest assured that we’ll keep you posted."
Reflections
“The conductor of an orchestra doesn’t make a sound. He depends, for his power, on his ability to make other people powerful.”~ Benjamin Zander
"If you could only sense how important you are to the lives of those you meet; how important you can be to the people you may never even dream of. There is something of yourself that you leave at every meeting with another person." ~Mr. Rogers
1st VOTE
By Kamilah Aisha Moon
It was hers.
She had this choice
behind curtained bliss,
Dad’s chest full on the other side
as her tapered hand
pulled the lever.
No matter how wide
the final margin,
a lone ballot
never counted so much.