By Jack Cumming
Recently, Steve Moran wrote, “It is the natural tendency of leaders to cling to power. They become leaders by being great at what they do. But what if being a great leader meant letting go of power?”
Are You a Me Leader or an Us Leader?
Organizations need talent, and micromanaging leaders kills talent. How can we best show emerging leaders that putting team members first is key to enterprise success? Do your first-line supervisors speak of my team, our team, or teamwork? Are they bosses or coaches?
At the recent LeadingAge California Conference, Steve Moran led a session to teach true teamwork. Steve has a gift for making wisdom seem like fun. The unorthodox structure of his session reflected his gift for people.
There was no panel. Instead, Steve led a stepping-stone exercise outside on the patio, which required spontaneously self-selected teams of five or six to work together or fail together. Team leadership was allowed to emerge naturally.
True Teams
We often hear people speak of “my team.” There were no such pretensions in Steve’s session. Most of us were meeting each other for the first time. As team members got to know one another, natural leadership emerged. There was no boss as such and no politicking.
With the corporate model, players often morph into ambitious rivals vying for recognition. In a true team, as with the stepping-stone game, the team comes together cohesively. The focus was on mission, not personalities.
I was the weakest player. The game required agility and balance, capabilities that age has taken from me. If ambition had triggered leadership rivalries, we would have failed because of me. But this was different.
The Natural Leader
Smit Gandhi, a natural leader, took me in tow. He contributed ideas to a winning strategy, and while doing that, he also steadied me to be sure that the whole team, including me, could share in the joy of success. We accomplished the mission successfully. As far as I can tell, there were no losers. Everyone won. Everyone benefited.
With the physicality of the wisdom exercise complete, we went back to our assigned convention room to debrief. The conversation was lively. Steve is a super storyteller. As he solicited feedback from the audience, stories naturally bubbled to the surface and brought everyone closer in a way that no PowerPoint presentation could ever do. The game seemed to transform the thinking of many in the room.
Learning From Playing
There’s so much to be learned from this fun event. Paramount is that leaders who empower others are far more likely to succeed than those who command. A well-formed team commits to a shared mission and naturally collaborates to achieve the mission.
Successful entrepreneurial founders understand this instinctively. They naturally draw talented people to their vision. What distinguishes the entrepreneur is a willingness to lead the leap into the risk of failure.
Great entrepreneurs not only take measured risks, but they also have the ability to motivate talented team members. Here, we mean team members in the true sense of “one for all and all for one.”
These attributes are often lost when second-generation leadership takes over from the first-generation entrepreneur. Successors tend to be administrators more than visionaries and legacy caretakers rather than innovators. Talent is less critical to a drifting organization.
The Power of the Game
The power of the game exercise was that it took the players back to that de novo organizational stage with which great enterprises begin. There are other games that help provide these insights, but the stepping-stone game was ideal for a conference setting.
Chess is good for learning to think ahead and for anticipating how a rival is also thinking far ahead. That’s very valuable for business strategy. American football, too, excels in separating planning — the huddle — from execution — the play and the razzle-dazzle. These are valuable skills for the real-world game of business.
No corporate team is more important than the board. Perhaps every board meeting should start with a game. Participants gained much wisdom from Steve Moran’s session and the stepping-stone game. That could be hugely valuable in building teamwork between the board and the C-suite. Moreover, it was fun, and fun can make learning easy and lasting.
