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How to Shape the Context in Theory
There’s three imperatives: Managing yourself, managing your network to set up to create the conditions necessary for your team to be successful, and then managing your team. And managing your team, there are a number of pieces of that puzzle. One is making sure you know what your priorities should be, what your plan should be. And when you’re talking about the plan defining the future, again, this might be something you do collectively with the team, but what you want to pay attention to is not simply, “what direction we’re going in,” but rather you want people to have an understanding of the purpose of the work. People really care about the meaning of the work – Why are we doing this? And even if you’re selling shoes, people want to have meaning, they want to know why it matters what they’re doing. They want to have some sense that they’re having impact on an organization they care about. So don’t just talk about, “We’re going to make this kind of money.” Help them understand why this organization matters, what you’re trying to get done, etc.
The other thing you want to do is really worry about building the right culture for your team. Because the culture of your team determines how effective your team is going to be. One of the things you want to talk about or think about in putting together that culture is, what really is going to make a difference in terms of our values and our norms for how we’re going to interact with each other, or how we’re going to think about problems that will allow us to achieve the performance we want to achieve, so to have people be satisfied and growing and have this be a team that is actually capable of adapting and learning and changing over time.
Now, one of the most important determinants of the culture of your team is going to be your own personal style, which is again why these three imperatives are all very interrelated, it goes back to managing yourself. You need to understand how your own style and preferences will impact that culture. So, for instance, if you’re most comfortable working one-on-one and dealing with conflictual situations one-on-one, you may not bring real work and real problems to the group to solve. Your team then may not develop the capacity to deal with conflict and to collaborate about difficult issues together, because of your own limitations, if you will, of only doing it in a one-on-one way.
Now, indeed, there are times when you want to do things one-on-one, but again, your own preference, if you’re way on that end, might lead you not to do group work. On the other hand, some of you may be so group-oriented, you call together meetings and you have more meetings than you need and sometimes you just need to make the call and not bring people together. You don’t have to be collaborating all the time. So again, you want to understand how your own preferences – if you’re supportive, if you’re confrontational, whatever it might be – what we know is that people who are most effective are pretty versatile because they adapt their behavior to the situation. But we’re not as versatile as we’d like to be, so you want to think about in building that culture, how your own limitations or your own preferences – they might be strengths in some ways – get in the way of your actually building the kind of culture you might need in that team, or in your particular team, to get the job done.
How to Shape the Context in Practice
One of the companies we’re looking at is Pixar. And I think we’d all say that that’s been a company that’s been very successful. And they have a culture in which, first off, people do feel like they’re a part of a community with a clear purpose and a set of values that have to do with excellence and collaboration and learning, and responsibility. That everybody has individual responsibility for what’s happening at the company, and also responsibility for the collective. And they have sort of rules about how you’re supposed to interact with people or engagement that are about respect. And so even the fresh voice or the young voice is valued, just like the very experienced voice, and they have very experienced voices there now, where, you know, people who have won many, many Academy Awards.
They understand that leadership is about shaping a context in which you sort of unleash the diverse talents of passionate people and you figure out how to harness those talents, those are a resource, for the collective good. As opposed to seeing leadership as being about: you’re the one who sets the direction and you inspire followers to sort of execute that direction. No, you’re the one who shapes the context so that these various communities of interest can emerge and are somewhat self-organizing and can innovate. So you’re more of a catalyst for the emergence of what’s a more bottom-up kind of process. Because most innovation actually happens that way.
Criteria for Success
You know, mediocre is not enough in this world. And so what may have worked five years ago, isn’t necessarily going to work nowadays. Again, because we are working in a global economy that is very competitive.
In terms of managing your team, there are at least three criteria you should pay attention to. One is, is your team performing? Are they really doing what you’re supposed to be doing – and obviously organizations give you all kinds of metrics for that. And that in some ways might feel like the easy one to know: Am I doing okay or not? The second is, are people on your team really satisfied? Are people on your team growing? And if, in fact, they’re not satisfied and not growing, if you’re having retention issues, then that might give you a signal you’re not doing what you need to be doing.
When you’re really great at being a boss, your team not only is performing and people are satisfied and growing, in fact, the other piece of the puzzle is your whole team knows how to adapt and change and learn together. And I think that’s the real signal of whether you’ve really built a team that’s quite effective, when you actually see that you have a team that’s agile enough to really again, take advantage of those opportunities and figure out how to change and take advantage of those opportunities for your organization.