You and your leaders all went to well regarded leadership certificate programs.
Some went to highly recommended group coaching programs.
You gave all your leaders 1:1 coaching to truly develop them.
So why aren’t things better?
Yeah, you’re getting the work done, but it feels like pulling teeth along the way.
It feels like you’re constantly working in the most difficult way possible.
Departments don’t talk to each other, don’t acknowledge what other departments are doing, and there’s open animosity between everyone.
What went wrong?
Training isn’t the problem here
Look, it’s not a skill issue. By all accounts, your leaders received great training and presumably great coaching and development.
In a perfect world, this would be enough to get everyone performing at a high level.
In the last issue, I wrote about the important role of creating better systems and processes in fixing these execution issues.
This week, I share about the second factor that’s getting in the way: Your leaders don’t know how to be a team.
Building a Leadership Team
“Silos” are often a dirty word in organizations. But that’s not your real issue.
Silos are normal and necessary – not everyone needs to collaborate with other departments every single moment of every single day.
The problem is threefold:
- Servant leadership has been perverted and misinterpreted into thinking that good leadership is fighting for their team at the expense of other teams
- The inherent scarcity mindset of nonprofit work has people thinking they need to fight for and hoard resources
- Traditional systems reward individual goals and often don’t account for collaborative work.
I’m not here to talk about how to better embody a servant leadership approach vs. another type of leadership approach.
What I CAN do is give you the tools and approaches needed to turn your leaders into a high performing leadership TEAM.
How to create high performing teams
There are countless books and thought pieces written about this topic.
Let me save you the reading – they all come down to the same core principles. Below, I run through the 6 that matter most.
You probably do some of these well. Focus on what’s missing or what you need to beef up.
- Your team needs a unifying vision and purpose
Without a common goal or clear purpose, everyone’s going to interpret the work their own way. This happens even more in nonprofit work, when everyone can have their own personal emotional reason for the work. Good intentions in 6 different directions still results in chaos.
Do not assume everyone is working toward the same goal.
- You need to define and enforce clear values/rules of the road
Not just the words you put on the website or wall, but how do you expect people to behave and get work done? What does the opposite of each of these values look like? What happens if someone doesn’t follow a value – even if they’re a high performer?
The hardest part isn’t defining them, it’s sticking with them when it’s inconvenient.
- RACI isn’t just a fancy word
RACI is a common framework to help define who needs to be kept in the loop on things, who is responsible for doing the work, who needs to be consulted on processes/decisions, and who is accountable for the work. The clearer you make this for your team, the less arguing there is about who’s in charge about a project or process.
- Like in all things, communication is key
Silos get a bad rap, because by themselves they aren’t the issue. Rather, you probably just don’t have clear mechanisms by which different departments are supposed to work with each other. In most places, it ends up being “they should be able to figure it out, it’s just common sense”.
Anyone who’s ever worked in HR or HR-adjacent fields will tell you – common sense isn’t common.
Spend time figuring out how you expect your leadership team to communicate with each other. How will they share information? What method should they be using? How will they keep track of projects and flow of information between each other?
- Use less individual goals, use more team-based goals
You shouldn’t get rid of individual goals in a performance management/development sense, but at this level, use them less and start holding them accountable to shared goals.
Don’t let them wriggle out by saying they did their part, but the other department(s) didn’t hold up their end. They either achieved it as a team or they didn’t.
Set up a clear check-in/review structure to regularly review goals and progress. Be relentless in holding leaders accountable to goals and progress. What will you do if they aren’t meeting their goals?
- Lean into conflict and a learning mindset
You can’t just tell people to trust each other.
That comes with time – with conflict, working through issues, and through repeated exposure.
As the Executive Director, you’re the facilitator guiding them through the process.
Where are situations/meetings where you can encourage disagreement? Where can you let people get into productive disagreements/conversations? How can you encourage people to share their failures openly? How can you reward learning opportunities/situations instead of punishing failures? What are opportunities to turn organizational setbacks into learning situations?
What you do, echoes through the organization
While these strategies may sound basic, leadership at the highest levels has a way of amplifying how well you’re doing this.
Missing one of these things among your senior leadership team may not be a huge deal, but you’ll see huge impacts on morale and productivity at the lower levels.
Conversely, when the entire leadership team is functioning well, every other team expands and grows beyond what you thought was ever possible.
It’s not glamorous, but the basics done well can have a larger impact than a hundred training programs.
Where do you see the most issues with your leadership team? Reply back and let me know!
Cheers,
Chris
PS – If you’re a human-services nonprofit that’s struggling with your leadership team: Let’s talk about it, find some time here: https://leadership-potential2.neetocal.com/hive
