About 14 years ago one of my clients, an expatriate who runs the Romanian operations of one of the most important heavy industrial material factories, called me to ask if I had read Patrick Lencioni's book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, a fable for leaders. At the time I had not read, and after doing my lessons, I began the journey of team coaching with many teams of top managers who wanted to overcome the dysfunctions that they recognized, or that they intuited in a way who worked with each other. I have to admit that over the years, the experience I have gained working with this frame of reference created by Lencioni has helped me to be able to go into deeper areas of teamwork, especially in the environments at the top of organizations where beliefs leaders about trust and vulnerability, how a leader at the top of the organization should relate to his role, are very strong and often quite difficult to change.
In this article, however, I do not want to refer to the necessary trust between the members of a team at the top of the organization. Trust is equally the foundation from which everything starts, but it is also a result of how the top team members define their thematic goal as clearly as possible and consciously and consistently work on it. Reality has shown, over time, that defining this thematic goal of the team can be very difficult.
What is the thematic goal?
A thematic goal is a very important topic that remains at the top of the organization's priorities for a certain period of time. For example, a reorganization of activities with the aim of reducing the time to market of some products or creating a culture of digitization to achieve a fast service to customers or, another type of thematic goal, obtaining a certain type of customers for the company , customers to ensure sustainable growth. The thematic goal is "that something" that will be first on the agenda of every member of the management team in the next 9-12 months, regardless of the organizational function he leads. From this thematic goal derives all the objectives of the organization and, subsequently, the objectives of each business function.
More often than not, in a top management team there is an assumption that everyone knows and shares this thematic goal, but the reality is that team members look at it from different angles and do not agree in unison on what that single goal is that guides their decisions in the next time frame. Because, a thematic goal is unique. And the discussion of choosing that goal to be at the top of everyone's list is often a difficult one.
Another characteristic of the thematic purpose that raises problems and debates is that it is defined qualitatively. Only after the definition and agreement is obtained regarding the single priority for the coming months, measurable and tangible objectives are cascaded for this purpose.
The difficulty comes, not necessarily from the fact that there is a high level of misalignment in the top management team, but because the exercise seems abstract and theoretical. The elements of the thematic purpose seem the same in other words and managers at the top of an organization, more often than not, pragmatic people who need numbers, tend to skip this stage quickly, feeling the ambiguity and the fact that they slip their own priorities through their fingers.
What makes this thematic goal important?
Healthy debate about where all organizational efforts need to converge and the efforts of each individual function or department leads to what is called taking responsibility. In this VUCA world, where rather uncertainty and ambiguity sometimes paralyze the decision-making or action process, generating delays that are often counterproductive to the overall results, if things do not go according to the initial scenarios, the unity of the management team can be very easily affected. We are not surprised to hear stories from the leadership team where some leaders complain about the lack of collaboration of other members, and in essence, they can report that the middle or operational teams fail to collaborate as a result of the lack of clarity or decision that comes from above.
Another aspect of top management commitment observable in many teams is the way in which this commitment is overt or nuanced, incorporating the fear of eventual failure. In this world where success is no longer guaranteed and the complexity of the environment demands well-honed skills of scenario generation and rapid agreement on potential courses of action, the lack of quality of this single thematic goal creates analysis mechanisms to the point of paralysis, of postponing some decisions and returning to the discussion in the loop even though apparently certain decisions have been made that would facilitate progress.
The thematic goal is not about defining the long-term vision with the top management team, it is about being able to clarify and establish the intermediate stages of achieving this already established vision, focusing on predictable time intervals to give a chance to synergies and collaboration to appear and manifest. The vision gets diluted and drifts away in the absence of this thematic goal and the clarification meeting is probably the most important meeting of the year for every leadership team. Before any discussion of budget, specific goals or strategies.
How do conflicting goals arise in the absence of a clearly defined goal?
Regardless of whether the organization is operated functionally or matrix, the chance of conflicting objectives between various departments is very high and found in the vast majority of companies. Either within the organizational matrix, objectives are defined which are then not discussed and harmonized at the local level or, if the organization only has a functional structure, it is guided by the assumption that some functions are more important than others, and this induces a lack of the habit of aligning or involve everyone in harmonizing the objectives. However you put it, the chance of generating tension in the organization is very high when the functionality of the leadership team is based on budget exercises, often built on a historical basis in which the impact of possible changes is difficult to estimate and incorporate into business scenarios. A sure source of the emergence of the phenomenon of avoiding responsibility in some situations or moving the ball from one department to another.
In another very valuable book by Patrick Lencioni, The Motive, the Author sets out to find the reason why many leaders abdicate the difficult but imperative responsibilities of their role. One of these responsibilities is to facilitate the discussion of the goal and work with each team member both individually and as a team, with or without the help of a team coach to support the achievement of this result and the collaborative process involved. It is a responsibility avoided because it involves a lot of discussion and conceptualization, abstract reasoning, often, and it is much easier to work on the basis of tables and figures, with the eventual forcing of assuming some performance indicators because, no- and so, "that's how it's always been", "that's how it should be", "there's nothing we can do"...etc.
The first is that "If I have arrived here, I have arrived on the basis of work and effort for many years, I have made sacrifices and, consequently, I deserve to enjoy this position and for the organization to follow me. It means I have the competence and the skills and the position is just confirmation of that.” Based on this belief, the sometimes slow and sometimes excruciating process of defining a thematic goal that is clear and to which every team member adheres ends up being avoided as a perceived waste of time and energy, and is something that it shouldn't be necessary since "we all know why we're there". It's just that the fact that this discussion isn't happening doesn't eliminate its necessity and the benefits it could bring, including speeding up and mobilizing the resources needed in the organization for success to occur.
The second belief is about the fact that the leader considers himself responsible, that it is his duty to do things for the organization and for his team, and consequently this duty and responsibility involves effort and difficulty which in many situations fuels a kind of of risk and growth in the leader's level of authority. Even in this case, the discussion about the purpose and its clarity does not come naturally because, most of the time, the leader tries to sell and induce a purpose in which he believes and, moreover, if the reaction of the team is not immediate and does not engage in discussing and appropriating this goal, feels the responsibility in a way that can weaken confidence in one's own ability: "My team does not resonate because there is something wrong either with my vision or with the way I present the problem to them, I don't know how to do it, there is something wrong with me or with them". Nothing more damaging.
Steps to a clearly defined goal
An important first step would be to realize that the top management team needs this clear purpose. The topic can be approached either individually with the help of an executive coach or, if the team has good interpersonal relationships and is well engaged in the day-to-day activity, directly with the help of the team with the support of a team coach to facilitate the process, provide feedback to the team about the way it engages in making these decisions and in the process of analyzing and defining the goal, and that maintains the appropriate level of responsibility so as not to rush or delay the process and has returned to the old habits of reporting to organizational goals.
A second important step is the establishment of team performance indicators, and here I am not referring to business performance indicators or indicators of the functions and departments represented by the members of the top management team. It is about those measurements that will tell the team that they are working well in support of this goal and that relate to the teamwork process, for example: the ability of the team to consistently return to the defined goal and to allocate time recurrently to at least three times a year to review progress toward that goal, and keeping the goal as the leadership team's number one priority. Another indicator would be the team's ability to establish working agreements and implement them consistently, provide feedback to each other, and hold each other accountable for the behaviors agreed to in these working agreements. Another indicator reflects the team's ability to discuss and determine what set of values will support the team throughout the year as they work toward this unique goal. Equally important is measuring how well the team manages to clarify each member's roles in achieving the goal and each member sets their own progress goals so that the goal can be achieved.
A third very important step is the way in which the progress towards the goal is monitored and it is validated along the way that the various business or departmental objectives support the thematic goal chosen by the top management team.
I make one last comment. Business objectives usually follow the financial year of the respective company. Either the calendar year or other ways of fixing the financial year depending on the parent company. (April – March or August – July, or October – September). To avoid the mechanism and automatisms involved in the routines generated by the company's financial year and to give the top management team the opportunity to work on the thematic goal, focusing on what is really important for the business and the top management team, the recommendation that I do is to do this thematic goal definition exercise about two, three months after the budget objectives have been established. In this way, the thematic goal of the team will not be confused with the projected business result. And this is because the top management team is not responsible for achieving the business result, but for implementing all those directions, actions, climate, culture, changes that will facilitate the organization to achieve results. The thematic goal is about this process of facilitating success.
Find out more about how you can grow and develop your team, develop your organization and its people by reading the other Executive Coaching articles we've published that outline better for those who haven't had such experience , the benefits and opportunities that the partnership brings through coaching both at the individual and team level.
published on PRWave.ro