- 27 - In your considerable experience as a team coach, what are the most common factors preventing organisational change from being realised? How do you ensure these are addressed during your work with clients? First is lack of true dedication for a set goal. “What must be true in six months, or one year, or three years?” is a question we keep asking teams, team leaders and CEOs we work with. Yes, there is always some striving, but if persistence to achieve the goal wears off in the middle of the process, the team will be thrown back to the same old same old. It is the curse of instant gratification that our brains strive for, and we must hack it. Acknowledging that we can only get to Mt Everest by climbing every single metre of it, we make the journey engaging and useful for everyone, every step of the way. All the activities we employ are combined and simplified enough to be digestible as we gradually but persistently help the team climb right to the top. Our Thriving Team and Thriving Leader programs take 4-6 months, and a year and upwards for a Thriving Organization. Second, “leaving the client half naked” as we say in our team. You see, there are amazing leadership and team and individual development concepts out there. Yet when going through trainings, organisations and leaders do not get enough help in incepting them into everyday reality. It is like starting off from the basecamp and going to the next camp, and then looking back on the last stretch. “What was most useful for me, and us, in the last three weeks? What new behaviours and conversations worked for me? What has held me back? How will we do much more of what has worked in the next three weeks?” Third, trying to adopt wrong behaviours. We are dealing with the most complex yet most important of all changes – behaviours and team dynamics – while at the same time knowing that 80%of attempts to change culture fail miserably. That is why we have based our methodology on leading insights and incorporating them into the client experience. You cannot really play a world-class game if you are not behaving like the world’s best. For us, nothing that is short of excellent works. We rely on Gallup and other great global analytical insights. We rely on the most effective habit-building approaches. We use the most effective mass movement principles. We use tacit experience built on the thousands of teams we have worked with to individualise the proven approach to the client’s context. Every step of the way, every activity in the team session is carefully designed to deliver exceptional experience towards the thriving team destination. Fourth, clients rely on consultants to bring the change. But we cannot do the climbing for them, nor we can support you after we are gone. And trust me, we do want to be gone and not support clients forever, as they must be capable of sustaining their thriving workplace. What, to your mind, are the key pillars of successful corporate leadership? Leadership is a well-researched phenomenon, but while there is a fair amount of consensus on what great leadership is, the devil is, as is often the case, in the details. In real life, leadership is extremely complex and there is one main reason for this – people. To be a great leader means to be able to engage and inspire people to dedicate their time, energy and creativity to achieve or create something which did not exist before. But people can only be engaged at work if they feel like it. That means that for me as a leader, my output is actually the right feelings in our people, and not the performance goals (which do result as a consequence). In our work with leaders, we find it helpful to provide a framework on how to think about what leaders need to do to be successful. We found that it lies in the following four key pillars: 1. Manage self – a leader needs to understand themselves first so they can manage their own well-being, emotions, behaviours and reactions with the goal of having a positive influence on the team and themselves. Here, we build on positive psychology of innate strengths, as they provide a profound mirror of their qualities as a leader. THE CEO INTERVIEW
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