It has been an amazing and humbling week, working closely with business leaders as they lead their teams through this extraordinary disruption. I have been privileged to share the 4-Step Framework with them and talk specifically about which phase of recovery they are in and which leadership skills are most important during each of the phases.
One consistent theme through these conversations is the evolving and persistent nature of this particular event. It seems like there is nothing that hasn’t shifted – either personally or among our teams, communities, clients, and partners. An emerging awareness is that while we are not going to outrun or out-compete COVID-19, we can outlead (and out collaborate) it.
Each of these conversations had a common thread: they all had a “heroic” bounce back story where they made adaptations to their existing business – and then it got hard. This crisis calls for us to sustain action and decision making in an environment where we don’t have as much information as we are used to (high uncertainty + the need for endurance is a formula for deep fatigue).
For this article, I’m going to zero in on one question:
How do we sustain high performance over the long arc that this pandemic requires?
A Brief Look at the Physics of Teams
Your pre-COVID-19 team was built for one environment and likely made up of four leadership styles:
- There is the Architect, who provides the vision for the group and excels in strategic planning
- There is the Catalyst, who excels in solo, ground-level execution
- There is the Anchor, who is the specialist in data, analysis, and detailed planning
Lastly, because these three styles naturally tend towards silo’ing and marginal performance, there is the Champion, who is skilled at leading this group of diverse expectations, communication skills, and mindsets into productive business alignment (for more on these styles, see articles here, here and here).
Your team was custom-tuned for the pre-COVID environment and was running smoothly and delivering for your clients. Now your team is called to go on an unprecedented and unplanned adaptive journey.
How Teams Shift Under Pressure
Each of these natural styles has a set of positive attributes and some dark sides that come up under pressure. This constantly shifting nature of the current crisis has pushed every one of our teams to very high levels of stress, and many of the business leaders I have been working with are seeing their leadership tested as well.
Under pressure, the following typically occurs:
- Our Architect/strategists will tend to want to back up and strategize frequently, which sends shockwaves through the whole team
- Our Catalyst/execution specialists will become lone wolves and skip meetings entirely
- Our Anchor/data specialists will move toward analysis paralysis and go quiet until they are sure they have the right answer
Unfortunately, these “dark side” attributes tend to show up when we as teams need to do the heavy lifting of coming up with fresh insights and approaches or agreeing on an integrated course of action. This can create a toxic brew that involves everyone doing their own things and the output of the team being mediocre at best and thoroughly stuck at its worst.
The Need for Transcendent Leadership
This puts a tremendous amount of pressure on the most senior executives (MSE) to reintegrate their team members and help them to perform at their absolute best as a team. Each of the leadership styles has strengths and blind spots, and unless they are skillfully integrated, missteps will occur – especially in these unique and baffling situations.
In normal times of business, missteps will create financial and market issues, however, in the current environment, the stakes are much higher. Personal safety is a very high bar, and it calls for the best possible team thinking we can bring to the table.
What it Looks Like
Skillful champion leaders use a variety of well-developed approaches to bring the best from their teams:
- They are experts in the leadership styles and can sense when a voice is missing
- They are expert listeners – listening without history or agenda, and highlighting and bringing all the styles to the same point of understanding
- They are natural translators – helping the team to not use jargon and buzzwords, but truly discuss the most complex issues in the plainest and simplest language
- They understand the difference in mindsets and expectations and can step into conflict without malice and help people drill down and find underlying agreement.
Gaining These Skills
The first three styles (architect, catalyst and anchor) are naturally occurring skills, and the intellectual work is to identify and share how the interactions look. This allows improvement in personal performance. To unlock stronger team performance, it is very useful to do a team diagnostic and briefing that allows everyone to come up to speed together. This provides a rich multi-directional set of learnings, insight, and team reinforcement for each person and the team as a whole.
Developing into a good champion leader is also an individual and team endeavor – and since this path is usually started with strength in one of the three natural styles, it is a learning and unlearning process. This is accomplished much faster with targeted coaching that improves the leader’s ability to see the team from 30,000 feet and provide the right combination of harmonizing, interpretation, and buffering to get the best results.
If you have hit a wall as a team and would like to move forward significantly, please reach out to me at 847-651-1014 or use this link to put a 20-minute call on the books.
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