The Executive Perspective

This is a question I deal with on a regular basis in our consulting practice. Either it is about the executive team, the marketing team, engineering team or any other team. You see this question often in organization with stronger silos. There is a lot of danger in those broad statements that need to be further clarified for the sake of the organization.

When you are in an organization where this happens, we make these broad statements about other teams often times without fully grounding these statements. Most likely, something happened in the past, and you made a story up about it, and then what happened and the story collapsed and you start living out of that story as it is the truth with a capital T. Once that happens, you most likely start defending that story, and even worse, amongst your team members you all agree on the story, and now this is the foundation for any future action in relation to that team. Do you recognize this happening?

What else has not happened? Chances are is that you, or anyone on your team, have never shared that story with anyone of the team that you are characterizing as not capable. Nobody on that team was able to explore it with you, even more, there is a good chance they are not even aware that this is what you think of them.

It still serves us though! When something goes wrong you can blame the other team for the problems, and because you never checked it out, you get to be right about it too! Let’s explore this for the management team.

This story is only an interpretation! When you are in this situation, what do you think the answers will be to the following questions?

• Would the people on the management team agree with this interpretation?
• Is this something that the management team has realized?
• Does it really apply to every person in the management team?

In general, it is highly unlikely that every single executive on such a team does not have the capacity to meet the new business demands. What I could believe, if there are facts, that they are not appreciating the new business reality, and that they are still taking the same actions that worked in their old environment, that no longer work in their new environment. You especially see this with organizations that have been very successful in the past but their environment has changed dramatically in recent times.

This does not mean they don’t have the capacity, it only tells me that certain conversations within the management team are not happening. Although it sounds simple, as seen by many failing companies, it is not. In such situations you are often dealing with blindness, the notion of what they don’t know, they don’t know.

Also, now you also see how quickly I came up with a different interpretation, but similar to the first statement, not a story that I have checked out with anyone yet.

It is part of your leadership skills in the organization, to initiate an authentic conversation based on your concern and your commitment to mutual success. From that perspective you should then mutually explore the facts of what is really happening and all the different interpretations that are possible. From there you can then agree on new actions that will lead to different and better results.

In my next blog, I will describe how you can start this conversation.