Which is your team?

Intro

Do you sometimes feel that the thing most holding your team back isn’t superior competitors or fickle customers, but your own organisation?

Every organisation is its own worst enemy to some degree. Your job as leader is to provide air cover from that friendly fire so your team can get on with becoming superior to your competitors and winning more fickle customers. But first you need to understand which team you're looking after.

What's the issue?

1. Friendly fire can be generated by accident. For example, poorly considered rules that have unintended consequences, such as low spend authority limits, or unnecessary steps in the process.

2. Friendly fire can also be generated intentionally. For example, leaders using toxic politics to put their own team or personal interests ahead of the greater good during budget setting.

3. Good leaders fight to win, right? Yes, but to win what? Their own battle, or the greater war?

4. Not pushing back against the internal machine at all is laissez-faire leadership. It’s low friction, low effort, and exposes your team to every negative aspect of how your organisation is run.

5. Fighting everything that interferes with your team might sound heroic and selfless, but actually it’s silo leadership. Breaking news: your team shouldn’t always get everything they want or keep everything they've got.

That balance isn’t well understood, and it's even less well lived.

Consider this

1. Here are every employee’s priorities: Organisation before team before self - as long as putting the organisation first helps the team longterm, and putting the team first helps you longterm.

2. As a leader, you have to balance all those needs. When the CEO is demanding that the product launch date is brought forward unrealistically - like the Boeing 737 max - you need to push back, not just to protect your team, but to protect the CEO from a disaster (in Boeing's case, 2 disasters) happening on their watch. It’s much easier and politically safer to accede to the Grande Fromage, and it even gives you the opportunity to say ‘told you so’ later. But it facilitates failure, and you're complicit.

3. But when you’re sitting on a healthy pile of hard-won budget that’s suddenly needed by R&D to get the next big thing over the line, you need to make an objective call about whether that money is best spent as planned in your team, or transferred over. The latter exposes rather than protects your own team, so how can that be good leadership? The answer’s easy when you understand which team you’re really in.

4. The longterm benefit of providing air cover for other teams as well as your own is that the next time you say ‘we’re the priority’ or ‘back off’, you’re more likely to be heard.

5. The red thread throughout all this is that your job as leader is to provide air cover for others - your team, and other teams - doing the difficult thing now to achieve higher performance later. Providing air cover for yourself should only happen only when it is a high priority for the organisation to do so.

6. One of the reasons everyone distrusts politicians is because they use their power to stay in power. If you want to be trusted as a leader, you have to use your power to help those who don’t have it.

Try this

Next time you have a difficult decision to make, check yourself about who and what you are fighting to progress and protect most from that decision – the organisation, your team, or yourself?