Teamness

You know exactly what your team needs to do. You know precisely how they should do it. But they keep on doing things differently. The wrong ‘what’, the wrong ‘how’, and poor results. If after many sessions of (im)patiently listening and trying to influence them, things don’t change, chances are you are either thinking about buying a book on ‘influencing skills’, or you have decided to make use of your authority to get your point of view implemented. Well – set yourself up for additional moments of disappointment, because in most cases that’s the result you’re most likely to reach.

Executive Committee and Board meetings have an advocacy to inquiry ratio of about 90% to 10%. That means, in our experience, that 9 interventions out of 10 are about explaining one’s opinions, for only 1 being an inquiry about others’ opinions. This results in misalignments, misunderstandings, poor cohesiveness, and occasional unsatisfactory decisions and personal prejudice. Business executives, when in meetings, have long lost their ability to question, to probe, to investigate. One man can change that. If he were still around, we would recommend you to hire him, at Board level or in your Executive Committee.

Successful careers are driven by ‘worksmanship’. Because workmanship is the main component of performance appraisals. Of incentives. Of rewards. This leads to a high performance (individualistic?) culture of KPI’s meet-my-targets. Adding ‘citizenship’ as a second dimension offers a more complete picture and opens up new perspectives on talent management.