People and Process Optimization Resources

Many organizations invest in team building events where games are played and discussions facilitated but little is actually accomplished to address fundamental improvements in how the team functions.   Many of these approaches are actually effective AFTER a proven method for improving self and team awareness is executed, but this is not common.  

In most leadership teams, many  think they are great communicators, conflict resolvers,  influencers, problem-solvers,    empathizers,  decision makers, coaches and on and on.  And, yes in each team,  some have these strengths  and some clearly don't and often they don't realize it. This overall lack of self awareness causes people to feature, and often lead with their weaknesses, which causes new problems, more conflict, lack of trust,  lack of buy-in - all, of which, have repercussions throughout the organization. The root cause of many of the team issues is simply a lack of self awareness which is really a sign that there is poor actionable understanding of each other.

Now a few months into the forced remote work environment, most organizations now believe their day to day execution productivity has improved - some dramatically. Many are making plans for long term remote work environments.  We are seeing greater challenges is in the longer term planning and strategic activities where mixed results are reported. Some organizations need to reach a better balance in how and what they communicate -  it's clear some are actually over doing it and that it is having an impact on leadership effectiveness. Others have grown tired of the communications aspect and have the opposite problem.  

Today, I want to draw your attention to a short discussion of some key elements of being a leader in a volatile unpredictable time - being an Agile Leader.  Necessarily this requires being able to distinguish between simple, complicated and complex decisions and the ability to use the appropriate process and style for each (or suffer very negative consequences.   In this discussion, Trish Gorman of Columbia Business School summarizes her list of the 6 traits of an agile leader.   One additional point that I would suggest, is to broaden the "awareness" attribute to include self and team as it is the foundation. Of course, we are biased as this is the core of our practice.

Back in 2003, we started a new process with executive teams who had just been through debriefs on their behavioral assessments focusing on both their  leadership, interpersonal and personal effectiveness behaviors and how effective they are in initiating, motivating, implementing and maintaining in each area.  We found that even after positive even emotional experiences improving their self-awareness and better understanding their causal factors underlying their behavior,  a few weeks later,  many reverted back to previous behaviors  with little benefit.   We hypothesized that if they had to share their perceptions of others and then share their actual behavioral tendencies (assessment scores), they would internalize it more.