MARK'S ARTICLES AND INSIGHTS

Here is the fifth element to strengthening teams throughout the organization: provide high-impact supporting resources.

While it is critical for your executive leadership and other high-impact teams to be high-functioning and cohesive, it obviously shouldn’t stop there. Every team in the organization needs to be high-functioning and cohesive. Here’s how.

I have noticed that as leaders of teams, we tend to focus our energy on the wrong work. Here are two examples to illustrate what I mean.

On summer break one year in college, I went on a mission’s trip to the Ukraine. During our time, we visited the home of one of our hosts, who proceeded to feed us small wafer cookies. Being Americans, we gobbled up the cookies in our hunger. As we were finishing up, I noticed our host nibbling on the same cookie with which he had started. While we were eating every cookie in sight, our host was carefully conserving his cookie. We had it backwards. We thought we were serving him by our presence. In reality, he was serving us. We were just eating up his cookies. As leaders of teams, we can also get this backwards.

Four years ago, my wife and I heard some mysterious noises in the attic above our bedroom, which became a good example of the importance of understanding the nature of a problem.