Chaos to calm: Why we need unity in our leadership teams S3 E3

Welcome to episode three in which Jenni talks about leadership as a team. When we talk about leadership, we often focus on talking about individuals; the one person to many. But more and more leadership is about a team. It’s about a group of leaders through a hierarchy – from line managers upwards – that need to be united.

Jenni shares the signs of chaos that can manifest in leadership teams to help you identify these from your own experience, and how to move from chaos to calm. She discusses how to ensure the direction of travel is clear, plus five ways to improve how you lead as a team.

Things that will help you go from chaos to calm:

Podcast: Chaos to Calm: Leadership behaviours S1 E2

Podcast: Chaos to Calm: Team friction S2 E3

Podcast: Calm Edged Rebels: How to be heard with productive disagreement S4 E2

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team – A Leadership Fable by Patrick Lencioni

Influential Internal Communication by Jenni Field

You can continue the conversation with Jenni on Twitter and LinkedIn

Transcript for this podcast

Welcome to this episode of Redefining Comms with me, Jenni Field. Today, I’m going to be talking about leadership as a team. Now, when we talk about leadership, it’s often done talking about individuals. It’s the one person to the many. But more and more leadership is about a team, or it’s about a group of leaders through a hierarchy, so from your line manager upwards. When we look up to leaders, it’s all relative. You know, the person on the front line serving customers or working with patients has a manager who leads that team, and then they have a manager who might lead that area or that site, and it goes on and on up to the CEO or the Managing Director or the Chair.

So, when it comes to leadership as a team, I want to talk about the chaos that happens when things aren’t aligned and the impact of the dysfunction at the top.

It’s a topic that often comes up in the work that I do with organisations looking to improve communication, because that alignment of the board or leadership team is often the first step to reducing the chaos. So, once we’ve covered that, I’m then going to talk about the five things for you to think about when you’re looking at how to make sure leadership is working well as a team inside your organisation. 

How can you spot chaos within your organisation?

So, the signs of chaos in a leadership team are things like a lack of trust and respect between individuals in that whole team. It’s different agendas or personal agendas that don’t align to the organisational goals.

You might have some dominant individuals or some really weak members with poor leadership skills. In a worse case, you might have apathy. So, leadership team members who just don’t take part, aren’t interested, don’t really care. And apathy, I think, is one of the worst things we can have in a leadership team. 

You could also have lack of confidentiality, so people sharing documents they shouldn’t be. You could have poor structure and group governance, so meetings and things like that aren’t well organised. You can have different messaging being shared across the organisation, so things aren’t aligned in terms of that cascade that needs to go through the organisation. And then you’ve got inconsistent sharing of that information, so teams being shared different things from different meetings and all those sorts of things. 

What are the Five Dysfunctions of a Team?

Now, I often reference Lencioni’s five dysfunctions of a team. And I’ve done that in two previous podcast episodes about team friction and leadership behaviours. So I’ve popped a link in the show notes for those and also to the book Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team. But just to recap, the five that are mentioned are:

So they are the five dysfunctions of a team. And I will always come back to them again and again, because they seem to ring true whenever I’m working with teams where things aren’t quite working how we want them to.

So have a think about your team, whether it’s a leadership team in a function or a board. Do any of these feel relevant to you? Are there things there that you’re seeing? Or you can think, actually, I can see how we’ve got an absence of trust. I can see how people aren’t being accountable. I can see we’ve got a lack of confidentiality. I can see poor structure and meeting governance. You might be able to see all of those and nodding along as you’re listening to me.

But if they are there, then you’re in this sort of chaotic area and the impact you’re having on those in the organisations. And if you are there, you’re in the sort of chaotic area. And if you’re in a leadership team and you’re seeing these, then the impact that’s having on people throughout your organisation is definitely being felt. 

How do you lead in the right way in relation to alignment?

Now, what’s important is that to lead isn’t always just about you. So, if you’re part of a leadership team, there’s a lot more to it. It’s not just about your behaviours and how you’re leading your specific team. If you’re part of a board or a senior management function or whatever it is, if there isn’t alignment across you as a group in terms of a synergy around your behaviours, then people are going to be confused.

And however well-intentioned your own actions might be, it could have a negative impact on people in the organisation if there is huge differences across that team. 

How do we move from chaos to calm?

Well, when I work with organisations to improve communication, I always start with diagnosing the root cause. Because once you can get a picture of what’s going on underneath the symptoms inside the organisation, you can really start to make some changes. So, as an example, we might see increased turnover of staff as a symptom, or we might see people saying there’s poor management of the organisation or there’s friction between departments.

Now, these symptoms are often linked to the leadership team and how they operate together. So, to kind of test that theory, I will then host one-to-one interviews with the leadership team after I’ve gathered some data on employee feedback and communication structures. And then it starts to get into that uncomfortable conversations that I’ve often talked about. 

We have to get comfortable being uncomfortable if we want to change organisations. And for a leadership team, we’re going to be looking at behaviours and lots of different elements that can feel slightly uncomfortable.

What are some things that you can focus on when leading a team?

Now, importantly, there are things that you can do to really focus on leadership as a team. So, I’m going to take you through the five things that we often come back to again and again.

1. Remember that you are part of a team

How you lead your team should have some similarities to others. This isn’t about everyone operating in exactly the same way. That would be boring and non-authentic and I would never encourage that. But it’s about having an agreement about how things are going to happen. If there is a leadership team meeting and there is an agreement that messages will be shared after that meeting, is it discussed about when that will happen or how that will happen?

Because if some people decide to do that in a face-to-face meeting, say 50% of the team have a face-to-face meeting with their team to brief messages, and then 15% send an email and then 15% do nothing at all, then we kind of end up with very different experiences through the organisation. And what will start to happen is people will think, okay, well, we had a meeting about that and you don’t even know it’s happened. And people will then start to distrust what’s going on in the organisation. And that starts to get us into states of threat and it will impact productivity and disengagement and all sorts of things.

So it might feel like it’s getting really into the detail, but agreeing that as a team is really important when it comes to communicating through the organisation. 

2. Find out what’s really going on and why people aren’t aligned and why there is dysfunction.

So, this comes back to that list that we talked about, that’s the chaotic list. If that’s happening, we need to understand why that’s happening. Is it because people don’t trust each other? Is it because people don’t really like each other? We need to have those conversations to understand what’s going on in order to help fix things and change things and work on those relationships across the team.

3. Discuss actions and words and the disconnect between those two

Now, this always comes up. I’m telling you, it comes up every time in conversations about this lack of understanding of saying one thing and doing another. And a lot of this comes back to the fact that we judge ourselves by our intent. So, by me saying to you, “My door’s always open.” I have the best intentions around that.

But if I’m never there to have an open door, or my metaphorical door isn’t open, the impact that has on others is huge. It kind of leads us into that state of distrust because we’re saying that we don’t really believe that your door’s open when you say it is. And that leads to disengagement and all sorts of things that run through the organisation.

So we need to make sure that actions and words are connected and that there is integrity there. And whether that’s our intention or whether it’s not, we just need to make sure we’re really clear about the reality of what we can actually do based on the words that we’re saying. 

4. Agree what things really mean

Now, this might sound a bit strange, but as a leadership team, it’s very easy to get into some really big words. So, meetings can be full of things like collaboration and adding value and connection and silo working. But what do they actually mean? They’re all phrases that we’ve all heard. And I’m not sure we could all completely agree on what collaboration means. What collaboration means to me might feel very different to you. So, we have to understand as a leadership team what that really means. 

Now, I always come back to an example around the phrase adding value. And it’s because I had a CEO that used to use it all the time. They’d always ask people, “How does this add value? How’s this adding value?” And I didn’t really know what that meant when it came to communication, which is the function I was running. And rather than sit there and guess, which I’d sort of tried to do for a while, not getting anywhere, I ended up going in to say, “Can you explain to me what you mean by adding value in relation to communication because it’s non-financial and I just want to have that discussion.” And they said to me, “Oh, it’s about risk.”

And it was probably a five minute conversation. But the benefit of that conversation and aligning myself to the leadership team to what was needed, to what the words meant, meant that I could change my strategy, change my focus and really kind of get cracking. And it was the best five minute conversation I’ve had. So we have to agree what things really mean. Otherwise we’re just second guessing each other or taking it from our own perceptions and beliefs and not really getting that discussion going about when we talk about collaboration, what does that feel like inside this organisation? What does that look like? And what are people doing? And those are the kind of conversations we need to have. 

5. Needs to be space for open debate

This is about having respectful conversations that are constructive. And I remember working with a business owner and telling him that it’s not personal, it’s business. Now, this isn’t, which he throws back in my face all the time, but this isn’t about dehumanising anything. It’s not about saying it’s business, it has to be cold, it’s not about people. It’s about remembering that people can disagree with you, they can have different opinions to you, and you can still work together.

We have to be able to have productive disagreement. And it’s a topic that I covered on my Calm Edged Rebels podcast. So, I’ve added the link to that in the show notes in case you want to go back and have a listen, because that discussion about productive disagreement is incredibly helpful when you’re looking at building a team or helping a team work better together.

But this isn’t just about the board or the management team, it’s about the senior management team in a function. It’s about the group of people that are being looked at or looked up to for direction, guidance and clarity. If that direction of travel, the way to get there isn’t clear, or the people telling others is going to end in chaos.

Now, I really could talk about this all day, because I think so many books and examples focus on leadership as one person, but the power of the group is so much more. And it’s often such a source of chaos in organisations that we’re working with. 

Thank you for listening!

Now, in the next episode, I’m going to be talking about how to rebuild trust. It’s on the back of a question I was asked from a client, and it prompted lots of discussion and further reading on my part, about trust as a concept, how it can be rebuilt, if it can be rebuilt, and how important it is to a functioning society or organisation.

Thank you for listening. I’d love to continue this conversation on Twitter or LinkedIn. And you can also join my community by subscribing to my mailing list. Please connect, ask questions and share your thinking with me. And details are in the show notes about how to stay in touch.