​Patrick Lencioni is well-known for his business best-sellers: The Five Dysfuctions of a Team (which I introduced here last month), The Ideal Team Player, and Death by Meeting. 

His last best-seller, The Advantage - Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business, is the culmination and integration of his previous works. It’s one of the most comprehensive and accessible books I’ve read on the key elements of an effective organization. 

In fact, many of the tools and concepts in the Scaling Up system and 7 Attributes of Agile Growth framework we use with companies are found in The Advantage.

In the book, Lencioni describes a healthy organization as one with minimal dysfunction, politics, and confusion. Instead, clarity and alignment reign, resulting in strong performance.

He argues that organizational health is the greatest advantage any business can have. And yet, it is largely ignored by business leaders.

Lencioni clearly and logically lays out the four disciplines to creating a healthy organization: 

1) build a cohesive leadership team - essentially the five focus-areas described in the Five Dysfunctions of a team: trust, conflict, commitment, accountability and results;

2) create clarity - of purpose, behaviours (ie. core values), offerings, competitive strategy, priorities, performance metrics and leadership team member roles;

3) overcommunicate clarity - repeated, aligned cascading communication from leadership team members to their direct reports and down the line;

4) reinforce clarity - through human systems - every process that involves people, from hiring and people management to training, compensation and termination.

Lencioni then slips in a 5th unofficial, yet critical, discipline titled “The Centrality of Meetings”, drawing from his Death by Meetings framework. In it, he underlines that no action, activity or process is more central to a healthy organization than effective meetings, from the daily check-in (huddle) through to the quarterly off-site.

A key point in The Advantage, which may be missed or forgotten, is that the single biggest factor determining whether an organization is going to get healthier, is the genuine commitment and active involvement of the top leader - the owner-operator, CEO or president.

Book length: 240 pages, 5 hour 25 minute audio. Soundview summary: 8 pages, 21 minute audio. GetAbstract summary: 5 pages, 10 minute audio.

How can you strengthen your organization?
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To find out how you can make your organization healthier to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, try our complimentary Agile Growth Checklist*. This self-service questionnaire takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. You'll receive the checklist with your responses immediately. Within 24 hours, you'll receive a compiled report highlighting areas to improve. This report is complementary and involves no obligation.

*Many of Patrick Lencioni’s best practices are included in our Agile Growth Checklist, as well as many others developed by world-renowned business leaders, researchers and professionals. ​

​In the previous 5 Minute Growth Tip article, I shared some tips for developing a successful strategy to compete and thrive in your market. Yet, developing a great strategy (and executing it) takes more than a framework. It takes a high performing leadership team. That, in turn, takes high performing leaders.

The People Challenge

As a CEO, president, owner or entrepreneur, you’ve likely had department heads on your team that didn’t meet your expectations or were poor leaders. It can be frustrating to be repeatedly disappointed or to have to continuously push, cajole or just grin and bear it. 

Yet, it’s entirely feasible to resolve these headaches and prevent them from happening in the first place.

This is about ensuring that, on the leadership team, we have the right people in the right seats doing the right things in the right ways. 

The key to getting it right is not to start by looking at the people. The first thing to do is define the right seats, right things and right ways, and then ensure we have the right people that fit what we need.

Right Seats

First, we want to ensure we have the right seats - the right roles needed on our leadership team. These usually include some common functional roles like marketing, sales, operations, accounting, finance, human resources, technology & systems, etc. 

Keep in mind that, often, leadership team members in mid-size companies need to play more than one role. Certain functions don’t need a full time leader just yet. By thinking of it this way,  we can identify what functional roles are being played by each leader, and whether the right roles exist on the team.

It may be that certain roles don’t exist that need to, or a role has been left unfilled.

It’s also helpful to identify any roles that seem to have more than one person playing them, causing mixed messages and confusion. It may also be that certain leaders are in too many roles, therefore being stretched thin and dropping balls.

Having the right seats means having clarity about what roles are needed and where there are gaps and overlaps.

Right Things

We also want to get each leader, and the whole leadership team, on the same page about what each role means and what is expected in terms of results (eg. role: marketing => results: qualified leads). 

It’s best if these results expectations are quantified with metrics and specific targets (eg. 50 qualified leads per month). The results, metrics and targets are the productivity side of each role.

The “right things” will often also include the big changes and improvements that need to be made within each function over the course of the year and/or the quarter.

Right Ways

We also want to be clear about the behavioural side. This includes defining the behavioural expectations needed across the leadership team and across the company.

These behaviours are captured in our core values. These core values distill the essential behaviours expected of everyone in the company, including the leadership team members. This is what enables great teamwork, productive conversations and problem-solving, developing a strong strategy and execution plan, and coordinating to execute.

Clarity on core values is also critical because leaders living them is one of the main ways the company’s culture is brought to life among employees.

Right People

With productivity and behaviour expectations clear, we want to ensure we have the right person in each seat. 

We can ask ourselves: is each person on the leadership team meeting our expectations...in terms of both the results expected in their role AND the behaviours captured in our core values?

Furthermore, if we want to build a thriving company, we’ll need A-players. We define A-players as being among the top 10% performers for the specific role and for the pay we can afford, AND they live and breathe all of our core values.

Being a top 10% leader doesn’t just mean doing a great job at one’s function: marketing, accounting or human resources, etc. It means getting great productivity from their people - both quantity and quality of work. This takes strong planning, communication, delegation, monitoring and coaching skills.

Often leaders tend towards one of two extremes: micro-managing or laisser-faire management. Strong leaders will stay involved enough to monitor and be supportive while at the same time letting experienced employees use their skills, be self-sufficient and take initiative.

A-player leaders create an environment in their department that inspires employees to perform at their best.

The Challenge of Behaviour Change

When it comes to leaders who don’t live our core values, it’s often a dead end. Because a person’s values can’t really be changed.

People behave according to what they believe. If they grew up believing that learning and adapting is valuable in its own right, they’ll learn and adapt on the job. If they believe that tradition, duty and compliance are noble, they won’t behave in adaptable ways.

If they don’t believe in one of our core values, there’s often not much we can do about it. We can coach them on that core value, and they may start behaving more in alignment with it for a while. And if so, great. It’s worth giving it a try. But often, they’ll slip back into their habits.

This means that often, a leader that isn’t living one or more of our core values never truly will. And so they’ll never be an A player leader, at least not in our company.

Addressing the Gaps

As CEOs, presidents and owners, we can often be hesitant to let a leader go who doesn’t fit. Our underlying concern is often that maybe we weren’t clear on our expectations or maybe we didn’t coach the leader enough or very effectively.

So, it can be reassuring to start by establishing clear expectations and providing better coaching where needed. At the end of the day, the leader may still not meet our expectations. But at least we’ll know that we did what we could to support them.

A good practice is to, every quarter, ask ourselves how each of the members of our leadership team are performing both in terms of results AND core values. Then, for any team members that aren’t performing, ask, what will I do about it this quarter? Will I coach them or cut the chord? If we keep coaching the leader on the same issue quarter after quarter, we should not only question their leadership, we should question ours too.

A Caution

Sometimes a leader’s poor performance IS in fact our fault. It’s entirely possible for a CEO to create an environment where people can’t perform well. Maybe we’re the micro-manager, or the laisser-faire manager. Or we set a poor example by not being accountable or not living some of our core values. 

If we have just one or two leaders whose performance is in question and the majority of the leaders reporting to us are performing great, we may have a people issue. Yet, if most or all of our leaders are struggling, chances are our own leadership is what needs work.

Working Through Hesitation

Usually, the decision to let a leader go isn’t hard. Once we think it through, it’s often pretty clear. It’s just that we avoid thinking it through. We avoid it because of how it feels. It’s sad. It’s disappointing. It’s nerve-racking. We can feel guilty or like a failure. 

If we acknowledge, accept and process those feelings, we can then face the facts of the situation and come to a logical, firm conclusion. This can usually be tackled with some pros and cons thinking, considering all the impacts of the leader, on both the culture and performance of their department, the leadership team and the company as a whole. 

Replacing a Leader

It’s one thing to come to realize and accept that a leader has to go. It’s another to feel confident we can successfully replace them with an A-player. If you’re concerned about this, you probably have a recruiting and selection problem. And you’re not alone. The average hiring process picks an A-player 25% of the time.

Implement the Top Grading or A-Method hiring process and you’ll notch that up to an 80 or 90% success rate. Replacing a top level leader is a great reason to make that change. You’ll get two trees with one stone: an A player leader and a drastic improvement in your hiring process.

As Jim Collins found in his research for Good to Great, the foundation of a thriving company is “disciplined people”. This includes being a Level 5 leader (determined AND humble) and getting the right people on the bus in the right seats on our leadership team. Only then can we create a great strategy collaboratively with our leadership team, to achieve efficient team buyin. And with buyin and a great leadership team, we can implement the right structures, systems and processes to grow more rapidly, profitably and sustainably.

Right? Not quite.

This is where great execution comes in. In my next 5 Minute Growth Tip article, I’ll share the common challenges with executing a strategy and the three key execution disciplines to minimize drama and maximize profitability.
​
How can you have more A-players in your company?
​
To find out how to have stronger talent and leaders to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, AND enjoy the ride, try our complimentary Agile Growth Checklist. This self-service questionnaire takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. You'll receive the checklist with your responses immediately. Within 24 hours, you'll receive a compiled report highlighting areas to improve. Complete section 2 to check your talent processes. Or complete all 7 sections to find out how your company is doing in each of the 7 areas needed to produce more rapid, profitable and sustainable growth. This report is complementary and involves no obligation.

Do you know this situation? You have delegated a task to a manager or employee. This person knocks on your door after a few days because they are stuck somewhere and asks you for advice. 

You are familiar with the topic, maybe you have even solved a similar problem before. As a former expert, you mentally jump straight into finding a solution or ask detailed questions to explore the problem while the other person is still talking. But because you don't have the time right now, say you'll take care of it and get back to the person. 

Let's take a quick look at this situation in terms of monkey management. what just happened The problem (i.e. the “monkey”) of the person suddenly no longer lies with them, but sits on their shoulders, grinning broadly. Congratulations on your new job. 

In individual cases, this may not be critical. But let's spin the scenario a little further: Let's say you have a management team of five people and each of these people comes to you with a problem once a week. Suddenly you have 20 strange "monkeys" sitting on your shoulders every month, driving you mentally crazy, distracting you from your actual tasks and increasingly crushing you with their weight. Your evenings are getting longer, the hours of the week more and more.

Coaching Example: Monkey Management and Unwanted Patterns

This is exactly what happened to a coaching client of mine recently. Let's call him Jan. Jan is the founder of a successful startup that has raised millions in funding and has grown to 25 employees in a short time. As a natural scientist with a doctorate, Jan has extremely high expertise in his field and loves to solve complex challenges. Jan came to me because he was frustrated and stressed about having to do the work of his young leaders again. 

It has often happened that managers and employees came to him with problems and difficult tasks and sought advice. Due to his high level of expertise and his solution-oriented thinking, Jan was immediately drawn into the details and usually had a good solution ready quickly. All of his managers and employees appreciated this and word got around. 

Jan's executives now came to him more and more often when things got tricky. His employees were also happy to present difficult tasks and topics to him from time to time - with or without prior registration. And Jan often took on a particularly tricky part - and he already had the whole task on his desk. 

Since there is now no shortage of challenging tasks in fast-growing organizations, Jan quickly became a valued expert and sparring partner for his managers - and suddenly he was working more and more often for his management team instead of the other way around. 

In the course of our coaching session, two key questions emerged to which we sought answers together:

1. How can Jan avoid the strange "Monkey" on his shoulder?
2. How does Jan manage not to become a "problem solver" when he has questions and still help his employees?

What Jan's team did was certainly not done with malicious intent. His employees simply knew that Jan had an extremely high level of expertise in his field. They had also learned that he had an answer or a good impulse for most questions. This had several negative consequences: 

• Jan's executives came to him too quickly and no longer took on the responsibility given to them.
• Jan's executives did not learn to grow with their demanding tasks.
• Jan kept getting strange “monkeys” placed on his shoulder.
• Jan too often slipped into his unwanted “problem solver” and “adviser” pattern, completing tasks that weren’t even his own.
• Jan's own pile of tasks as managing director grew until he was frustrated and stressed out and sought help.

During the coaching session, Jan came to four key insights:

1. I have to stay in my leadership role.
2. I need to change my leadership style towards “leader as a coach”.
3. I mustn't rush into finding a solution.
4. I'm not the only expert on every problem.

This is how Jan got rid of strange monkeys and unwanted patterns. 

During the session I presented Jan with the seven coaching questions – a coaching tool from Michael Bungay Stanier's bestseller “The Coaching Habit”. We then adapted these questions together in such a way that they would help him with his two challenges “Monkey Management” and “Avoiding Unwanted Patterns”.

​Jan's seven coaching questions

First of all, I advised Jan to buy himself a few seconds for future calls for help from his team with a rescue question or a comment like: 
"Oh, that's an exciting question!" This should help him not immediately fall into his unwanted problem solver pattern.

The following seven – slightly modified – coaching questions should help Jan to not let a strange “monkey” sit on his shoulder again. 

Question No. 1: What exactly is on your mind here? Jan thus plays the problem back to his employees and helps them to articulate it more precisely.

Question #2: And what else? Jan asks this question three times in a row - in a slightly different form - and helps his employees to get to the root cause of the problem.

Question No. 3: What exactly is the specific challenge for you here? With this question, Jan focuses the attention of his employees on exactly the point where they are stuck. 

​Question #4: So what exactly do you want to achieve? Jan helps his employees to fast-forward and to develop a concrete vision for their solution.

Question #5: If your problem were solved, what exactly would be different? How should the result look? What is the value of the solution? What might the solution look like? Here I consciously exchanged the original coaching question "How can I help" so that Jan does not fall back into his unwanted "problem solver" pattern. 

Question 6: Who else can solve this problem besides me and you? Who can point out a solution? Who of those affected or outside (suppliers, partners, acquaintances, former colleagues...) can still help? I replaced this question so that Jan could show his employees an alternative. Again, I swapped out the original question to get Jan out of his "helper syndrome".

Question 7: What do you pull out for yourself? What do you take away from the conversation? With this question, Jan is supposed to help his employees to reflect. The aim is for his employees to recognize how they will tackle problems in the future and find solutions independently.   

Mastery through repetition

These coaching questions initially sounded very strange to Jan. So that he could make them his own and find individual formulations, I recommended that he look for a buddy in the organization. That was a colleague or a friend he could try out these questions on. As with so many things in life, practice and repetition makes perfect. 

At the same time, this buddy from the organization should always watch with him when he slips into his original pattern and remind him what he wanted to do instead. Each time it will be easier for Jan to find his own formulations for these questions. And if he falls into an unwanted pattern again, his coaching buddy will point it out to him. 

Conclusion 

Do you sometimes struggle with the strange monkey on your shoulders or do you find yourself too quick to find a solution in conversations? Simply develop your own version of these seven coaching questions. Find a buddy in your organization with whom you can try out and practice these questions. Over time you will find your own formulations that sound less and less practiced. 

This buddy will also point out to you if you go straight into finding a solution instead of listening to your counterpart and helping him to find the answers himself. I wish you every success and enjoy trying it out!
If you would like to learn more about coaching habits and unwanted patterns, I recommend these two books: 
“ Multipliers – How the best leaders make everyone smarter ” – Liz Wiseman
" The Coaching Habit - Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever " - Michael Bungay Stanier 

With best wishes,
Olaf Sell

https://justgrow.eu/blog/​

If you're interested in reading more of Olaf articles please visit the website link above. (Please note that Olaf's site is in German but Google translate does an excellent job of instantly translating it to English.)

How can you elevate your people to the next level?
​
To find out what you can improve in your leadership team to grow more easily, quickly and profitability, try our complimentary Agile Growth Checklist*. This self-service questionnaire takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. You'll receive the checklist with your responses immediately. Within 24 hours, you'll receive a compiled report highlighting areas to improve. This report is complementary and involves no obligation.  Complete section 1 and 4 to check your leadership team* and accountability processes*. Or complete all 7 sections to find out how your company is doing in each of the 7 areas needed to produce more rapid, profitable and sustainable growth. ​