Messy business of senior teams

As well as being a rather infectious song, the Hockey Cokey also describes the messy business of being in a team when you are a leader.

“You put your right foot in,
You put your right foot out,
You put your right foot in,
And you shake it all about.
You do the Hokey Cokey,
And you turn it all around,
That’s what it’s all about…

Let me tell you how…

If you think about an organisation as a system, then you can start to be conscious of the unhelpful patterns that play out. When things happen, we often make the answer personal, assuming it’s someone’s fault. In his rather weighty book Seeing Systems (it has big print and pictures!) Oshry brings to life this playbook of patterns, this bigger context. He helps us see it for what it is.

Let’s take one of these: the experience of being a “top”.  A top is someone who wakes in the middle of the night worrying, and knows that they are likely alone in doing so.  

Being a Top

What is unique for a top is they feel a sense of responsibility for the whole team, department, function, or organisation.  Being a top means having too much to do, not enough time, with complex problems (i.e. no-one else has been able to fix it!), and hence always fighting fires (sound familiar?).  As a result they feel isolated, desperate to simplify, burdened and a little paranoid. I appreciate, not a very sexy advert for leadership!

These rather messy conditions naturally invite humans to seek refuge and comfort.  For tops, this means seeing themselves as belonging in their own teams (i.e. the one below them that they are leading).  Unlike what it says on paper, they don’t see themselves as belonging to the Leadership team or executive board.  Back to our Hockey Cokey, they don’t have their foot in this Leadership team.  

Right foot in

As a result they are often heard bitching about other leaders behind their backs, only seeing each other in meetings or formal settings, focusing on problems in other’s functions, and pushing agendas that benefit their own teams.  This rather destructive turf war is often described as politics (with a little p).  But if you think about it systemically, it makes sense because it’s really difficult to have a foot in both teams.  This is one of the unique difficulties in creating teamwork at the top.  This is often the root cause of silos, mixed messages, lack of cooperation and alignment that are often highlighted.    

I remember the shameful moment, in a team development session, when I realised that I had fallen into this trap.  I was essentially sitting on the side lines of our leadership team, absolving myself of having any responsibility for it being dysfunctional.  I had my foot firmly in my own team, and was expecting my boss to miraculously do something about it.  

The alternative, if you choose to accept it, is to see yourself as a fully invested member of the leadership team that you are in.  Belonging in this way means being prepared to help one of your fellow exec. members, holding your hands up when you or your team make a mistake, being prepared to give up resources for the greater good and spending time together to build relationships.   

Making this transition will feel uncomfortable because the team working for you benefits enormously from you being “one of them”.  But if you want to improve how your Leadership team works, it means changing how you belong to it.    

So what?

As you read this blog, ask yourself:

• If this resonates, which team do you belong to?
• Where are you unconsciously engaging in destructive patterns?
• How could you experiment with being one foot in with the leadership team?