Team Formation Predicament

Leaders working to build a strong leadership team can be more effective when they understand that there are three basic reasons that potential team members wrestle with forming a leadership team:

Giving up our independence and power
Managers, who become part of a leadership team, find their individual success dependent on other manager's performance and contributions. Most managers are willing to make sacrifices to achieve their own individual success, balk at teamwork demands to make sacrifices for the group success.

Putting up with members not pulling their worth

Leadership teams are made up of managers that perceive rightly or even wrongly of a team member not contributing to the team success or exhibiting the same work ethic. This fosters resentment within the management team.

Teams can be dsyfunctional and slow to respond to challenges

Patrick Lencioni in his book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team identifies dsyfunctions with resulting attitudes and behaviors:

• Lack of trust - people don't feel safe to reveal mistakes, share concerns, or express ideas
• Fear of Conflict - people go along for sake of harmony , not talking things out until it bursts into the open
• Lack of Committment - people do not commit to team decisions because they have not contributed their true opinion
• Avoidance of Accountability - people don't accept responsibility and engage in finger pointing when things go wrong
• Inattention to results - Members put personal ambition and success over the collective team success

The Appreciative Inquiry 4D Change model can be a powerful tool create a functional team by building on the member individual and collective strengths, creating a preferred future state and making the necessary changes to achieve that result.

Leading Change through Appreciative Inquiry

The role of the leader is to make sure organizations change as needed to respond to threats, opportunities, or shifts in the organization's environment. Leading change is an intentional process of determining the current state of the organization, followed by the shaping of a preferred future state, which results in an action plan, and then the implementation of change.

John Kotter developed a model that helps leaders guide their organizations through change:

1. Light a fire for Change
2. Get the right people on board
3. Paint a compelling picture
4. Communicate, Communicate, Communicate
5. Get rid of obstacles and empower people to act
6. Achieve and celebrate wins
7. Keep it moving
8. Find ways to make changes stick

Lighting a fire for change happens when people believe that the change is really needed. There needs to be a sense of urgency generated in such a way that people's emotions are impacted. It is much more important for the people to feel the need for the change rather than see facts and figures. The evaluation of the current state in an appreciative way during the AI Discover stage builds of a foundation of celebration of success. This generates enthusiasm and confidence to make changes that align with the question of what the organization wants more of? This strong shared foundation creates the fire and energy to think about the future state, called Dream in the AI 4-D process. This establishes the best of what exists and begins to gather momentum for change.

During the Discover change it very important to identify the people that will help shape and drive the change. Change is complex and no one person can implement a meaningful change alone. For successful change there is a need to build a diverse and strong team of people with a shared committment to the success of the organization to generate the the possibility of change. One of the best practices is to start by selecting three core leaders - the first as the visionary leader for the change; second the logistics and project management leader; and the inviter/relationships leader who will provide the communications.  Next find three more people that share the idea of the change and complement the three leaders bringing the team to six total. The final step to complete the change team is to review the team and add six more people that complement and fill gaps in power bases and skills not present in the original six.

Leaders start to create a vision of what could be and develop a compelling picture of the possibilities of change. This Dream process step of AI is characterized by open ended questions and a focus on abundance and possibilities rather than scarcity and barriers. Often the team will record their ideas and dreams in pictures and images to paint the compelling picture of the preferred future state. The use of positive and expansive language forms the change that will be raalyed around and moved forward. Finally the team asks what would the organization look like five years from now if the dream / preferred future state was fully implemented.

How to make the dream real? The question that transitions the AI process from Dream to Design. During this transition, the leaders tell the message of the change no just once rather over and over again. This combats the reality that change throws people into confusion, uncertainty, and stress which is not a state conducive to hearing clearly and processing information effectively. While it is important to communicate the change verbally it is far more important to demonstrate the change in actions by the leadership.

The design stage of the AI 4D process is one of the most difficult for most organizations to implement. Characterized by the answers to the question: how do we make the dream real? Leaders focus the team through providing resources, knowledge, methods, and discretion to create an implementation plan. Success during this period is characterized by examining methods, policies, procedures that impact or hinder progress on implementing the plan. This process involves getting rid of obstacles and empowering people to act. This design formulates the plans to achieve success.

The implementation of the plans in AI is called destiny. This stage involves the timetable and activities being implemented in the change. Telling stories of success about achieving those wins celebrate progress and builds support for the change. Build the momentum through those celebrations of the cheivement of key milestone events which keep the change moving forward. Finally as the changes are implemented find ways to make them part of the every day life of the organization.

Lead by Moving On

There comes a time in leadership where the organization needs to move on from something it has always done. Something that was once healthy becomes old and, tired and ineffective. Even traditions that formed the bedrock and foundation of the organization can become out-dated and counter-productive. These organizations, traditions, and activities can be fiercely defended by some who remember a much happier and more prosperous time. So is this story of a beloved horse who was the pride of the stable in its youth now not able to get around quite the same way. As far as I know there is no source to turn to to attribute this story, it has passed to becoming just ancient knowledge that rings uncomfortably true today.

Some people, in an organization, are said to have gotten together and brainstormed some strategies for dealing with the beloved  "dead horse" and returning it to its former glory... one might call it an organizational parable.

• change the leader/rider
• use a stronger whip
• shout and threaten the horse
• appoint a committee to study the horse
• visit other places to see how they ride dead horses
• appoint a committee to revive the dead horse
• increase funding to improve the dead horse's performance
• bring in consultants to show how to ride a dead horse
• harness several dead horses together to increase speed
• declare a dead horse is less expensive to maintain than a live one
• form a work group to find uses for a dead horse
• promote the dead horse to a shiny example of leadership

Think about your dead horses and move on. If you don't get this organizational parable, that's ok many leaders of the original parables did not get them either.

LEAD - Listening Skills

A friend of mine who is a corporate leader and thinker remarked recently that the problems of the world could be summed up by the lack of leadership and the presence of injustice in the world. He also believes that business where there is the absence of injustice and the presence of leadership can move the world forward in a substantial way. Considering that injustice is about the lack of fairness, inequity, corruption, tyranny, repression, exploitation, and intolerance it seemed that the answer or at least a small step forward was to improve relationships between people which at its core is one of the strong tenets of effective leadership.

Relationships in the workplace are focused on the way employees, supervision, and the organization (senior management) treat each other. How they talk to each other, behave toward each other, and deal with one another is how the Merriam-Webster dictionary views relationships. A key leadership skill to shape and improve the work environment and perhaps the world is to develop effective listening skills. Good listening skills are important to relationships because at the core of sustainable positive relationships are trust and respect which can be mutually found through effective listening to one another.

There are a number of scholarly works that spell out the characteristics of effective listening. In business and in building teams of people these are some of the best practices:

• Be involved in the conversation and listen actively. Show interest, nod, ask questions, and paraphrase what is being said and learned. 
• Ask open ended questions by avoiding "yes & no" questions and process the response with an open mind that wants to learn not a mind already made up.
• Stay focused on the conversation. Do not get distracted rather concentrate on the moment. Since thought is faster than speech, stay in the moment by summarizing and checking back to the point being made.
• Stay open to the possibilities of changing position and hold your fire. Do not judge until the other position is fully understood. The stronger you feel about your position, the more open to the possibilities you need to become.
• Listen for the idea and rationale. Resist nit-picking the facts, find areas of common ground of agreement. Emphasize the areas of agreement and stay away from focusing on the differences.
• Work at listening by good eye contact, positive posture, and engaging actively. Resist interrupting thought trains and learn to be present with the other person.

Let me know if you have other best practices. Good listening skills promote and multiply good leadership. Good leadership fights injustice. The business improves and sustains performance. At least that is the premise of good leadership being promoted here.

Leadership Lens & Role - HR

Human Resource professionals are tasked with viewing the organization through the leadership lens that employees are the most valuable organizational asset. Employees, if led properly, will create a competitive advantage and appreciate in value to the organization. Leadership change theories are plentiful that can be deployed to create an environment and develop leadership skills where the human resource asset appreciates and contributes to that competitive advantage. Appreciative Inquiry provides a complementary and powerful change tool to today's lean organizations, as an example, that seeks to find the best of what exists, imagine what could be, formulate a plan to achieve what should be, and then live out that new vision. Leaders are seen as not relying solely on position power rather build relationships by empowering and engaging the individual employees and work teams in the common mission.

The role of the Human Resource professional is complex seeing the organization through this Leadership lens. The effective Human Resource professional in facts takes on three distinct roles:

• Employee advocate 
• Supervisor / Manager supporter 
• Organization advocate & protector 

The HR professional as an employee advocate looking through the leadership lens that the employees are the most valuable organizational advocate stands up for those employees when they are seen as being a cost and a waste as organizations deploy lean concepts without the partnership with AI. Pressure on organizations to constantly reduce cost place the HR professional acting as an employee advocate in direct conflict with operations and financial management unless handled properly. The HR resource must argue for the concept that employees appreciate in value and offer a competitive advantage or they can become cynical and numb to the impact on the organization of poorly treated employees. The economy, the move to distance/part-time workers, and merging of companies have led to this becoming an increasingly rare effective role for the HR professional.

The HR professional as a supervisor/manager supporter is one of advisor and partner who helps the supervisor get the most out of their employees. Equipping the supervisor/manager with mangement and leadership skills to empower and encourage their employees to achieve improvements in output or reduction of costs. Pressure comes from the employees who sees the supervisor/manager as not supporting them and from poor performing employees who weigh down the performance of the units. At the same time the company needs to be protected from the impact of failure to follow the employment laws. The HR professional instead of acting as a partner with the front line manager and supervisor often seems to be the chief critic of the supervisor/ manager obsessed with protecting the company and abandoning the supervisor/manager.

The HR professional as the organization advocate & protector can become so focused on that protection that the most valuable asset - the organization's employees - are not uniquely encouraged and empowered for success, rather all employees are treated the same as to not create the environment to excel. Creativity and initiative are crushed under the heavy weight of conformity.

HR professionals need to find a effective balance between these three roles. Appreciative inquiry as a change model values employees by finding the best in them, sets free the supervisor/manager to encourage and empower their employees, and develop a plan that protects and advocate for the organization through a vision of what could be...