Team Productivity factors: Leadership Teams and the Alignment factor

Deloitte’s Human Capital Trends 2016 included an article with a heading “The Rise of Teams”. It describes how teams will be even more important in the future since more and more organizations move away from functional structure. Teams are expected to create results and work efficiently with other teams and networks.

Team Coaching International’s team assessment survey Team Diagnostic™, together with the following team coaching process, provides a unique approach to working with team performance from the “team as a dynamic system” viewpoint. Based on team research Team Diagnostic™ model has 14 team performance indicators. Seven of these factors, so called Productivity factors are necessary in order for the team to get the job done. These Productivity Strengths are: Team Leadership, Resources, Decision Making, Proactivity, Accountability, Goals & Strategies and Alignment. In Team Diagnostic™ model we also have 7 Positivity Factors, which are connected to the collaboration culture of the team. They are: Trust, Respect, Camaraderie, Communication, Constructive Interaction, Values Diversity and Optimism. High performing Teams need to be strong both in Productivity and Positivity factors.

These 14 factors also are closely connected to each other and they influence each other – both in a positive way and unfortunately also in a negative way, when that is the situation.

One productivity factor that quite often gets special attention during a leadership team coaching process is Alignment. In the Team Diagnostic Model the presence of alignment is defined like this:

“The team values cooperation, cohesion and interdependence. There is a sense of common mission and purpose. Team would say, “We don’t always agree, but we stand together.”

Alignment is important in all kind of teams. In leadership teams the alignment strength is really crucial. When a leadership team is not aligned, the consequences are many. Here are a few examples:

– Confusion in the organization due to conflicting stories and different messages told
– Unhealthy competition between team members and their units
– Avoidance of important topics because it’s too dangerous to touch the issues
– Lack of support from colleagues and other teams / units

Many of these consequences are connected to organizational culture. The organizational culture can’t be healthy and strong if the leadership team does not build and support the culture in an aligned way.

When working with leadership teams, I have observed that team members usually agree on the importance of alignment. On the other hand, when you start to dig in deeper and ask questions connected to alignment, you often find out that there are issues to be discussed.

How can you notice that a leadership team is not aligned? What are the questions to be asked?

One of the most common signs of misalignment in a leadership team is team members focus on their own division/unit/area – the so-called silo effect.’ There might also be a team leader who wants to be the “one and only” being in charge. There might exist unclarity around the roles. Or you can hear many different interpretations of the company strategy and the messages from the top team to their organizations are like different stories. And so on.

One of the fundamental questions to be asked is: Does this leadership team want to be a team or is it just a group of managers meeting for information or coordination purposes. In their book “Senior Leadership Teams” Ruth Wageman & al. ask, “What makes a Group of Executives a Real Team”. They conclude that real leadership teams have interdependent work, they are clearly bounded (know who belongs to the team) and they are reasonably stable over time (learn to know each other’s strengths and limitations). Being interdependent means that leadership teams share responsibility for achieving collective purpose. They are responsible for their individual roles but at the same time they also work together, they rely on one another and they use each other’s experience to accomplish collective purpose. (Wageman et al. p. 43-44).

Team Diagnostic™ model’s description of alignment is very similar to how Wageman & al research team describe the “Interdependence” characteristic of a real team. Like mentioned above, in TDA model alignment means that “The team values cooperation, cohesion and interdependence. There is a sense of common mission and purpose.” And as an important clarification, the TDA description also describes the team saying, “We don’t always agree, but we stand together.” This is something that is very important for the team members to understand and commit to. This is the “HOW” of alignment factor – how to reach it. The many questions to be asked and discussed can be like:

– Do we have a common purpose – how do we understand the purpose of our team (and the wider organization)?
– How do we understand our own role and other members’ roles in this team?
– Do we have clarity of our roles?
– Do we agree on the strategic goals and priorities?
– Do we stand behind the change initiatives?
– Are we open and state our misbeliefs and doubts that hinder commitment?
– Do we dare to ask again if we don’t get the answer?
– Do we put controversial topics on the table or is back talk part of the leadership team culture?

Although it might take some time, these questions need to be covered in a leadership team discussion. When the leadership team has trust and is strong in constructive interactions it has better chances to be efficient in having these discussions. To have this kind of “Alignment Discussions” is really important and the only way to ensure alignment (“Alignment Discussion” is a term used by Mary Beth O’Neill in her Executive Coaching Tools course when referring to the need to create alignment in a leadership team) E.g. in a change situation it’s important that team members can openly react and speak about their concerns, excitements, hopes and fears. This phase is crucial to create commitment and accountability.

This alignment discussion phase is too often taken too artificially – or not taken at all. However, to be able to execute strategy and succeed, team members need to have the answers and understand the need for alignment in their actions and words.

On the personal level these discussions need participants to have courage and commitment to openness and constructive disagreement when needed. If personal agenda’s and organizationally harmful politics are part of the culture, then many questions may be asked only in leadership team members’ minds.

People differ a lot in their natural readiness to ask questions and challenge. Where someone is clearly a challenger and always questions the decisions, another might be reluctant to disagree openly. Knowing team members natural preferences in communication helps here. The foundation is trust– like concerning many other Team Performance indicators. Trust is a base that you need to have on place in a team to build the other blocks. Trust is also something that often increases in “alignment discussions”. And accountability and results will follow.