Understand the Journey Ahead

If you are like most leaders, you probably spend most of your time thinking about your performance or that of your team, function, or division. You also spend considerable time in silos or dealing with “us versus them” dynamics in your organization. Working in highly individualistic, hyper-competitive, dog-eat-dog cultures wears people down. As a result, you have learned to protect your turf, keep your cards close to your chest, and be a bystander in your organization, all of which impedes your company’s ability to execute its strategy and create enduring value.

Here’s a little secret: Your peers and colleagues are fed up with working at cross-purposes, staying stuck in silos, fighting with one another, and leading in uninspiring cultures.

All of this is weighing down on them, too. I once worked with the COO of a global professional services organization. In our first conversation, he said, “Our organization has been set up to frustrate people and impede progress. It’s exhausting. We need to find a way to break through.”

Most leaders I talk to want to be in an environment where there is real clarity, alignment, commitment, and mutual support. We want it desperately because we know intuitively that this is the environment that will help us be our best. That’s what a community of leaders is all about. Your organization needs your help to create one.

The good news is that you can help from wherever you are in your organization. You don’t need the permission of your CEO or manager. You can build a community anywhere. It just takes an accountable leader to want it and make it happen. Are you up for it? Does the vision of creating a strong community of leaders excite you? I hope you said yes to both questions. Let’s continue.

Are You Wired to Be a Community Builder?

Leaders who are naturals at this kind of stuff are, at their core, selfless. These leaders rarely put themselves or their agendas first. They lead with a higher purpose in mind. Robert K. Greenleaf called this servant leadership.

Reflect on the following questions to determine whether you are wired to be a community builder.

The first question you need to think about is: Are you selfish or selfless? Many of us as leaders have been conditioned to place self-interest above all else. We are always thinking: “What’s in it for me?” Interestingly, everyone else you work with can spot a selfish leader. They know everything is all about you, and it erodes their trust and their willingness to work with you.

The next questions you need to reflect on are: Do you have a propensity to use your power not only to promote your career but also to hold others down? Do you take advantage of your position to make decisions and orchestrate outcomes so that you will personally gain in the end? Do you withhold information from others because it gives you an advantage? These behaviors do not build community - far from it.

Another set of questions to explore is: How much of your energy is spent protecting your turf ? Are you locked in battles over resources with peers and colleagues? This is a classic challenge in many organizations. We set up a zero-sum game where, if you win, you do so at the expense of a colleague, and if others win, they do so at your cost. So you are eternally locked in a battle. Also, you most likely make decisions and take actions only through a personal lens, rather than doing what’s best for your entire company. If you’re worried only about your department, budget, and resources, you’ll never build a genuine sense of community.

Another question to consider is: Do you typically act as a bystander in your organization? Think about how you respond when you see others struggle, whether they are individuals, teams, or departments. You see their pain and their anguish as they try to drive success but run into problems. How do you respond? Are you a good Samaritan who offers help? Do you stand there and watch, perhaps even relish in the misfortune of others?

A final set of questions to consider is: Are you a political animal? Do you spend all your time caught up in the ongoing drama of your organization and workplace? Do you spend more time scheming and planning your next career move than you do leading and driving business results?

What does this quick assessment tell you about yourself? If you answered yes to even a few of the questions above, then you have some serious work to do to develop the mindset of a community builder.

Develop a One-Company Mindset

To be an effective community builder requires a one-company mindset. While you may be primarily accountable for driving the success of a team, function, department, or line of business, the way you do it matters. Do you approach that task with a single-minded focus, or do you approach it with a broader perspective?

Unfortunately, the research I shared earlier in the book revealed that a one-company mindset is one of the lowest-rated leadership behaviors. I believe part of the reason is that it hasn’t been an expectation of leaders. You have most likely developed a more functional mindset from years of being entrenched in silos. In the end, this creates a sort of rigidity in how leaders approach their work. You become much more “inward-looking,” focused primarily on your team, function, or department and unable or unwilling to work outside these boundaries.

Reflect on this for yourself: How much time do you spend focused (or preoccupied) on leading inside your team, functional, or business unit? If you are like most leaders, the answer is a lot.

A leader who participated in one of our leadership programs shared a strategy for developing a one-company mindset that worked for her. She held quarterly “big-picture” lunch meetings, where she invited some of her peers from across the company. Over lunch, they would discuss broad business issues they faced. These meetings yielded very positive results for the organization. First, the group developed a one-company mindset as they learned to appreciate their colleagues’ issues. Second, they identified areas where they could work more effectively together. Finally, they spearheaded initiatives to bring greater alignment and engagement in their work together. They did this all on their own. No senior executive was telling them to do it. That’s real leadership accountability.

Another leader shared an even more straightforward tactic. She developed the practice of taking a walk around her office building once a day. Each day she would take about 15 or 20 minutes, venture to a different floor at the headquarters, and drop by the office of a colleague to chat for a few minutes. At first, some of her colleagues did not know how to take this strange behavior. However, she persisted. During these conversations, she asked about what her colleagues were working on currently, the challenges they were facing, and the possible ways they could work together. The practice was personally beneficial to this senior leader because she developed an excellent understanding of how the organization operated as a whole. It also helped her to lead her division more effectively with the interests of the entire organization at heart.

In what ways can you develop a one-company mindset? I believe this will become increasingly important in organizations because many of them are striving to operate more as “one-company.”

Act in the Interest of the Whole Organization

I recently worked with an organization in the insurance industry. The CEO asked the senior leaders who reported into the executive team to solve a complicated and thorny business problem. The solution wasn’t readily apparent. The top leaders met several times, and the discussions did not go well—mainly because all of them came into those meetings with their elbows high, fists in the air, ready to fight. No one conceded in any way for fear of looking like they had lost. The discussions kept going around and around—no one budged.

Finally, one leader proposed that she would be prepared to give up resources to support another colleague. Suddenly, the tone of the conversation changed. Another leader offered to help a colleague. Soon the solution they had spent hours trying to find emerged, almost with no effort. They went from being solely fixated on their self-interests to acting more broadly in the interest of the entire organization.

I was in a Leadership Contract session with those leaders several weeks after this significant breakthrough. As they told me the story, I asked them what led to the change in their approach. They said that as soon as that one leader offered to help another colleague, the energy in the room changed from hostility to collegiality and mutual support. I asked that leader what led to her decision. She said she stood back and thought about what was best for the organization as a whole to resolve the issue. The very moment she had that thought, the solution was right in front of her. She knew what she had to do.

Interestingly, in some organizations, that one leader’s behavior would have been perceived as a sign of weakness. Not in this organization. Her colleagues saw her as a leader with real courage and strength. Another leader summarized the entire experience by saying, “We stopped behaving like small-minded managers and started to behave as accountable leaders for this entire company.” I love it when this happens. I also know it has fueled these leaders to go after even more chronic problems that have been holding them back.

This example shows the value when leaders act in the best interest of the whole organization. As you reflect on your role, where can you be doing the same? What opportunities exist for you to demonstrate that you act in the best interest of your entire company?

Cultivate Credibility and Trust

When you are trying to build a community, you quickly begin to realize how important it is to have credibility and build trust with your colleagues. Others will not want to engage with you if they don’t believe you are someone they can trust. Many leaders assume that authority and power come from one’s position and title. However, in today’s organizations, a title alone will not get you very far. Increasingly, you are working with peers and colleagues with whom you have no formal authority. You may not be their boss or manager. If you want to get something done, the only currency you have is your credibility and track record.

I’ve seen too many leaders become marginalized within their organizations because they don’t have the credibility they need. It could be because they are mediocre and weak performers, or because they are bullies and not team players. Often, “workarounds” emerge as people try to avoid interacting with these individuals altogether.

Typically, when a leader has a negative reputation, this perception extends to the team he or she leads as well. As a result, you need to be deliberate in understanding the state of your personal credibility and the extent to which you have built trust with peers and colleagues.

In the book The Leadership Gap, my co-author David Weiss and I presented a simple way to think about the stages of trust that help build credibility.

• Are you competent? The first stage is where people trust you because of your competence. Quite simply, this means that you are good at what you do. You are reliable, responsive, and deliver high-quality work. Your colleagues can trust you to deliver on what you say you will deliver and do so at a high standard. If you can’t fulfill this first stage—in other words, if you are inept or mediocre as a leader—it’s hard to build credibility with others.
• Are you honest and forthright? The second stage is the extent to which others can trust you to be honest and forthright. People need to know they can trust what you say. It’s also about the alignment between what you say and what you do. When you get it right, the people you work with perceive you as being honest and forthright. This stage of trust reflects the degree to which there is close alignment between what you say you will do and what you deliver. Many times trust is broken by unfulfilled promises. If something doesn’t work out, do you have the courage and honesty to admit your mistake, apologize, and repair the relationship?
• Can you be counted on to have my back? The last stage of trust comes when people know that if they are vulnerable, they can count on you to support them. You will not take advantage of them in any way. For example, if you see someone talking badly about another colleague, what do you do? Do you join in, or do you challenge the person to stop the bad-mouthing? When colleagues are struggling and going through a tough time, are you there for them? Or do you walk away? If you hear something in the corporate grapevine that suggests a colleague’s project is in trouble, do you share that information with them? Or do you keep it to yourself and watch them crash and burn?

Building your credibility and trusting relationships is critical to leading in organizations today. However, there is another crucial benefit. When you have credibility and trusting relationships with peers and colleagues, it becomes so much easier to confront difficult issues and have tough conversations with them. It creates the necessary foundation for you to tackle the hard work with your colleagues.

I believe one of the primary reasons leaders struggle to have tough conversations with one another is because they attempt to have them in the absence of a trusting relationship. Think about this for a moment. Imagine that you and I were colleagues, but we didn’t invest any time in our relationship. Now imagine I came to you one day, challenging you on an issue. Your immediate response might be, “Who the heck does Vince think he is? How dare he challenge the work of my team and me!” You can imagine where the conversation would go next. We would most likely engage in a heated argument that would further erode our working relationship.

Let’s imagine a different scenario—one where you and I spent time getting to know one another. We have built mutual credibility and trust. When I come to challenge you, or you come to challenge me, and we need to have a tough conversation, it will go very differently, mainly because you will understand me, my motives, and what I’m trying to achieve.

How would you evaluate the current state of your credibility with your peers? Have you built trusting relationships? Does the absence of both make it harder for you to have tough conversations with these peers?

Break Down Mental Silos

I was getting ready to lead a half-day session on The Leadership Contract with the top 80 leaders of a health care organization. As soon as the CEO walked into the training room, she said, “I hate this pillar!” She pointed to the large pillar right in the middle of the room. It was about three feet wide on each of the four sides. It was there to provide structural support, of course, but it was smack dab in the middle of the room. As a result, we had half the chairs organized on one side of the pillar and half on the other side.

Later in the session, the topic of organizational silos came up. I told the group what the CEO said about the pillar. Then I said, “Let’s talk a little bit about what this pillar does.” Many in the group chimed in: “It provides structure. Without it, the ceiling would fall on us.” Then I said, “The pillar has value. But there are some unintended consequences. Can you name some?” Several answers immediately emerged. “It’s dividing the group into two,” said one leader. Another shared, “It’s blocking my view. I can’t even see some of the others in the room.” Finally, another leader said, “It makes having a large group discussion difficult because we have to constantly move to see who is talking.”

Then I said, “The pillar is like the silos we create in an organization. They do serve some purpose, mainly to organize and structure people; but they also have unintended consequences.” One of the things silos do is govern behavior. We start making assumptions about what we can and cannot do. We feel we can’t cross the room to talk to colleagues. We compete with one another. We imagine one silo is better than another. In the end, a lot of drama can ensue.

I explained that the biggest silos are not physical, but in our heads. As leaders, we must do the hard work of breaking down these “mental silos.”

We then evolved the discussion to explore the barriers that were getting in their way as senior leaders. We even discovered that many of the leaders in the room didn’t talk to one another because it wasn’t customary for leaders from different departments to do that. They didn’t involve each other in planning departmental priorities that had an organization-wide impact because they never thought they could. They revealed that they had developed what they called a “mail it in” habit, where a team would put a minimal amount of effort into supporting another team’s project. They’d just “mail it in” without really owning their part. They knew this wasn’t the right thing to do, but no one challenged the habit.

It was a great discussion, and those leaders left that room with a much greater awareness of the mental silos that were getting in their way and slowing down their collective success.

Take a few minutes to think about the mental silos that are getting in your way. What one thing could you do today to start breaking down those silos? If we don’t regularly ask ourselves this question, we make the hard work of leadership even harder.

Invest in Relationships

Has this ever happened to you? You are out running errands and bump into a friend you haven’t seen for some time. You are both excited to see one another. You spend a few minutes catching up. You bring the conversation to an end and one of you says, “We should make a point of getting together for a coffee.” You both agree wholeheartedly. It’s a great idea. You leave and go on with the rest of your day. What happens next? In most cases, nothing. You both have the best intentions to reach out, but life gets in the way and you do nothing at all.

The same kind of thing happens in organizations. Every single time I talk with senior leaders about building a strong leadership culture, one revelation emerges—they admit to doing a poor job of building relationships with one another. In some cases, they say they are downright awful. At least they don’t deny it. Now they have good intentions. They want to do it, but as I said many times in The Leadership Contract, “Good intentions are not good enough when it comes to leadership.”

We need to start investing in building relationships with our peers and colleagues. We need to go beyond good intentions. The reasons are many. So much of the way we work today is collaborative and team- based. We are more interdependent than ever before. You can only succeed if I help you succeed. I can only succeed if you help me succeed. We need each other to deliver results. What I’ve also learned in my client work is that many problems leaders face in executing strategy come down to poor relationships with their colleagues. You can’t build a sense of community among a group of strangers. It’s not how we are wired as human beings. When we encounter strangers, we tend to be apprehensive and fearful. It’s a good survival mechanism that has served humanity well for thousands of years. But in organizations, it’s a killer.

In The Leadership Contract, I shared the five most frequently cited tactics for building relationships with internal colleagues. In The Leadership Contract Field Guide, I also provided a template that you can use to assess the strengths of your current relationships. I’d encourage you to review those activities as a way of helping you invest in relationship-building with your colleagues. We use these templates in our seminars, and leaders always walk away with surprising insights.

But for now, think about the priorities you and your team must deliver on for your organization. Ask yourself which relationships are critical to your success. Is it an individual leader? Another group or department? Now think about the status of the relationship: Is it strong, weak, strained, or even nonexistent? What are you doing to make the relationship as strong as it can be?

Be a Good Follower

One of the things you realize as you work to build community in your organization is that you need to be good at leading, but you also need to know how to follow. This may sound counterintuitive. After all, this is a leadership book, you might be saying to yourself. But a lot of recent research has examined the concept of followership. My personal take on this work is that it perpetuates the idea that organizations are made up of two kinds of people—those who lead and those who follow. These researchers tend to define followership as those who are in subordinate roles, directed by someone who is the leader. This leads to a limited view of how leadership unfolds in organizations today.

A few years back, I jumped on a conference call with a colleague who was new to our company. He was in Europe, and we were having our first discussion about a significant proposal for a leadership development opportunity. My colleague was spearheading the process, and our team had other colleagues on the line who represented different internal functions and geographies. Many of these colleagues had never worked with each other before.

It was fascinating to see my new colleague in action. He was quite adept at moving the agenda forward and pushing people when required. I also found there were times when I had to jump in and take the lead, and other times when I had to step back and follow the lead of my colleagues. I needed to take direction from a colleague who wasn’t my direct manager. I needed to align and support the course of the entire team. I also needed to deliver on my commitments. Finally, I needed to support the success of my colleagues in their efforts to help us win. I found myself moving back and forth from leading to following and saw my colleagues doing the same. It was like a dance. I discovered that I needed to pay attention and be very deliberate in how I showed up to add value to the team.

The next time you find yourself in a meeting with peers from across your organization, observe yourself in action. Do you find yourself always leading and taking charge? Are you doing all the talking or are you allowing others time to speak? Do you see opportunities where you need to shift to be more of a follower?

In today’s complex organizations, a leader who is a lousy follower can be just as much of a liability as a leader who is not stepping up. I would argue that good followership is part of being an accountable leader today. Ultimately, being part of a community of leaders is all about knowing when to lead and when to follow, when to push forward, and when to pull back and let someone else lead the way.