Cohesive Leadership Teams are Key to Productive Organizations

BELMONT, MA (06/18/2007)(readMedia)-- Many leaders can wrongly identify their team as cohesive because everyone seems to get along at meetings. Often however, the lack of conflict on teams is a sign of team dysfunction, not strength.

"If people don't trust each other, they don't want to enter into conflict," says Patrick Lencioni, president of The Table Group, and best selling author of the book, "The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive." "When you don't have the argument during the meeting, it usually comes out in the halls or through back channel politics."

Lencioni identifies four “obsessions” of leaders who build healthy organizations that get better business results.

• Build and maintain a cohesive leadership team.

• Create organizational clarity.

• Over-communicate the organizational clarity to employees.

• Reinforce the clarity through human systems, such as hiring and performance reviews.

Russ Sabia, Principal of SheerLine Associates, a Boston-based consulting partner of Lencioni’s firm, provides these pointers to team leaders:

• Cohesive teams conduct themselves very differently than an average team. Great teams have higher levels of trust, engage in lively and unfiltered debate, have higher levels of commitment and accountability, and get better and faster results. Having a cohesive leadership team is the most crucial component of a healthy organization, and encouraging people to engage in productive conflict during meetings actually leads to that cohesiveness rather than jeopardizing it.

• Regarding organizational clarity - it is remarkable how often leadership teams have different and sometimes competing ideas about important matters such as the business’s core purpose, values, strategy and goals. Here again, an absence of conflict often contributes to the lack of clarity because the leadership team never works through these issues enough to gain closure and buy-in from team members. The result is waves of confusion throughout the organization.

• Executives are often reluctant to over-communicate, believing that employees should have to hear their message only once before marching to it. Just the opposite is true, however. Leaders need to consistently reinforce their key messages through their own actions as well as through multiple mediums so that it's clear to employees that it's not just a management whim. The message needs to be simple and repeated often - recent research shows that people need to hear a message at least 7 times in a corporate setting before they begin to believe it.

• As part of embedding their messages in the culture, companies need to continually reinforce their clarity through simple human systems that drive correct behavior and decisions when leaders are not around. Examples of this are hiring practices that screen for candidates with similar values as well as performance management processes and incentive systems that reinforce what behaviors and values are important.

SheerLine Associates works with business leaders and their teams to help them improve the effectiveness and health of their organizations through improved leader capability, increased team cohesiveness, and greater organizational clarity. To learn more, go to www.sheerlineassociates.com.