Building a Healthy Leadership Team

I started working with a personal trainer a couple of years ago. Although I had always exercised—lots of biking, yoga, and an occasional foray into strength training—I realized that I could use some help putting it all together into a plan that covered all the fitness bases and that I could manage.

And, despite all the blogs I read, videos I watched, and friends I chatted with, I was plagued by the feeling that I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

Suffice it to say, my first session was a serious butt-kicking—discovering a few key areas of fitness (and the attendant muscle groups) that I hadn’t worked enough or in the right way (for instance, I assumed biking a lot meant I didn’t need to do as many lower body exercises—of course, the opposite is actually true).

I can do nothing in this life without somehow relating it back to management, nonprofits, or some aspect of organizational culture.

Hey, I’ve got a vitally absorbing creative interest (look up that phrase, plus “Albert Ellis”— it’s a thing). What can I say?

As I was being coached to be more thorough in my fitness regimen, I wondered how I could use what I was learning to better coach the leadership teams, boards, and executive directors I have the privilege to support. I’m hoping my trainer doesn’t read this—he’d probably point out that I should focus on the matter at hand, not leadership development techniques, while I am exercising.

The question that kept coming up for me was how teams need to develop the same capacities that fitness buffs (and I) do. In the realm of physical fitness, it looks like this:

• Strength. Being able to exert force.

• Stamina. Sustaining physical or mental effort over time.

• Flexibility. Having good range of motion.

• Stability. Controlling movement and maintaining posture balance.

Strength training, cardiovascular exertion, and yoga (or something similar) will usually hit all the bases for the human body. But how do we hit all the bases for our leadership teams?

• Make sure they have the strength they need to face whatever may come up?

• That they have the stick-to-itiveness to endure both immediate crises and long-term challenges?

• That no situation will upset a balanced approach to attending to everything that needs to be done and everyone involved in the doing?

How do these concepts translate to building strong leadership units? Here’s where my musings take me:

• Strength: Hard skills, knowledge, and expertise to do whatever job faces the organization and team.

• Stamina: The fortitude to see long-term change through to the end (or the beginning of the next change—don’t you just love change?)

• Flexibility: The adaptability to respond fully to the day-to-day changes and more seismic upheavals in the organization and external environment.

• Stability: The ability to build and maintain trust in organizational leadership and engage the staff, board, communities, and donors in the mission.

With those working definitions in mind, how do we assess these capacities and then set strategies for leveraging the team’s assets to build the strengths that could be developed further?

Here are some questions you can use to reflect on how you and your leadership team operate. It’s key that you look at this not as individual performance but as the performance of the entire unit. You can manage individual issues that may affect the overall functioning of the team with the individual in question.

Strength

• Do we share a clear and compelling strategic vision that keeps the organization evolving and impact growing?

• Is the team capable of leading the work on all aspects of our strategy?

• Do we operate with clear norms that guide how we work together?

• Is equity and social justice embedded in our strategy and prioritized in how we work with one another?

• Are our meeting agendas focused, and do our meetings produce clear decisions, action items, and accountability for follow-through?

Stamina

• Are we communicating with one another in meaningful and effective ways?

• Are we able to have difficult conversations, disagree productively, come to decisions, and commit to those decisions as a group?

• Do members of the team prioritize team success over personal success and step in to support one another as circumstances dictate?

• Are we incorporating team and self-care practices into the way we work to help sustain our energy and commitment?

Flexibility

• Are we able to reprioritize and adapt quickly and thoughtfully in response to internal and external changes?

• Are we regularly listening to our beneficiaries, staff, board, and donors to understand their needs and perspectives, gather feedback, and adjust our plans to maintain alignment?

Stability

• Are we managing the team in a way that builds a strong and consistent culture?

• Are the organizational values evident in how the leadership team shows up across all areas of the organization?

• Is accountability central to our practices—to one another, staff, the communities we serve, and the board?

• Do we have strong communication norms that remain consistent even under stress or change?

• Is care for the team incorporated into our overall management approach in a sustainable way?

With your reflections in hand, you can target areas of team performance that could be strengthened by reaching out to consultants who coach teams. You can also work with your executive coach to develop strategies you can implement yourself during team retreats or ongoing team meetings.

Depending on the specific issues you identify, you can draw from a variety of approaches that support building a stronger team—from Patrick Lencioni (team dynamics, trust, and leadership) to Amy Edmondson (psychological safety and team learning) to Dr. Robert Livingston (inclusive leadership and team dynamics across difference) and several others I reference at the end of this blog.

Of course, I also learned through my work with a trainer that all of this work needs to be a regular part of our schedules. We can't build the capabilities of our team and ourselves like we crammed for an exam in college. Strength, stamina, flexibility, and stability need to be fully developed well before they are tested.

And while we are developing some core competencies, we can’t stop exercising the very capabilities that got us here.

If you’re ready to build the performance of your leadership team (and entire organization in the process), let’s connect. You can email me at gary@garybagley.com, message me on LinkedIn, or schedule a conversation.

Some Authors You Might Explore

Dr. Ella Bell Smith (identity and power in professional women’s teams) – Our Separate Ways

Daniel Coyle (team culture and cohesion) – The Culture Code

Amy Edmondson (psychological safety and learning teams) – The Fearless Organization

Jon Katzenbach & Douglas Smith (team performance) – The Wisdom of Teams

Patrick Lencioni (team dynamics and leadership) – The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

Dr. Robert Livingston (inclusive leadership and race in teams) – The Conversation

Dr. Stella Nkomo (race, gender, and organizational leadership) – Our Separate Ways

Dr. Tina Opie (racial/gender trust-building in teams) – Shared Sisterhood

John a. powell (belonging, inclusion, and systemic team dynamics) – “The Problem of Othering”

Edgar Schein (organizational culture and inquiry) – Humble Inquiry

Peter Senge (team learning and systems leadership) – The Fifth Discipline

Simon Sinek (purpose-driven leadership) – Leaders Eat Last

Bruce Tuckman (team development stages) – “Developmental Sequence in Small Groups”

Liz Wiseman (empowering leadership and team potential) – Multipliers

Dr. Kenji Yoshino (belonging and authenticity in teams) – Covering

Margaret Wheatley (systems thinking and leadership) – Leadership and the New Science