Dear Oksana, thank you as always for your engagement and your perspectives.
I will share my experience as well as my evolving thinking...
1. it is not easy to apply a perfect formula, because believe it or not this can happen to high performing senior executive teams even at the highest levels and with all the resources at their disposal.
2. there are a few things that in my experience work in order not to lose the edge:
a. very solid chartering of your team refreshed every year anchoring on purpose, culture and behaviors before anything else. take the time for good quality off-site annually to ensure that culture and expectations on behaviors are rock solid. If this suffers everything will crumble
b. spend enough time to be clear on priorities and precise on goals, as well as on establishing a simple yet powerful operational excellence model. The better you do this and the more aligned with enterprise priorities your team is, the "easier" it will be for the most important things to get done well, building momentum (high team morale) and creating capacity (freeing resources) to work on THE EDGE
c. the edge is nothing more than working on projects for continuous process improvement, on initiatives that raise the bar of what is possible and on dedicating time and resources to work on innovation. Sometimes it can be as simple as refining your governance, just to be clear on how important it is to pay attention to the smallest of things. An improved governance can yield more agility, and that can be all that is needed for your team not to burn out.
All I am trying to say is that in order not to lose the edge the first thing is to make sure that the basics NEVER go wrong! Getting the basics right over and over again is probably more important than big innovative ideas. Then, it is critical to create capacity, space, time and direction for the teams to deliver on what matters and explore the new frontiers. Both at the same time. This is what works. The executive literature calls is "Exploit and Explore"
Great post about an important aspect quite often forgotten! I loved the definition of complacency as a silent killer; it is so true. It brings me back to thinking that within a team there always should be one person who plays the role of the exterior critic. That person doesn’t have to be necessarily a leader, but someone who has enough insight to counterpoint the popular narrative within a team. I’ve been in teams where such persons were disliked because they pushed others to think a bit more, and eventually the team had fallen into a trap of complacency. According to your opinion, Sebastian, what does a leader need to do and how do they need to structure their team in order to prevent the team from growing into the complacency mindset? I’m curious to hear from your experiences...
Dear Oksana, thank you as always for your engagement and your perspectives.
I will share my experience as well as my evolving thinking...
1. it is not easy to apply a perfect formula, because believe it or not this can happen to high performing senior executive teams even at the highest levels and with all the resources at their disposal.
2. there are a few things that in my experience work in order not to lose the edge:
a. very solid chartering of your team refreshed every year anchoring on purpose, culture and behaviors before anything else. take the time for good quality off-site annually to ensure that culture and expectations on behaviors are rock solid. If this suffers everything will crumble
b. spend enough time to be clear on priorities and precise on goals, as well as on establishing a simple yet powerful operational excellence model. The better you do this and the more aligned with enterprise priorities your team is, the "easier" it will be for the most important things to get done well, building momentum (high team morale) and creating capacity (freeing resources) to work on THE EDGE
c. the edge is nothing more than working on projects for continuous process improvement, on initiatives that raise the bar of what is possible and on dedicating time and resources to work on innovation. Sometimes it can be as simple as refining your governance, just to be clear on how important it is to pay attention to the smallest of things. An improved governance can yield more agility, and that can be all that is needed for your team not to burn out.
All I am trying to say is that in order not to lose the edge the first thing is to make sure that the basics NEVER go wrong! Getting the basics right over and over again is probably more important than big innovative ideas. Then, it is critical to create capacity, space, time and direction for the teams to deliver on what matters and explore the new frontiers. Both at the same time. This is what works. The executive literature calls is "Exploit and Explore"
Thank you for sharing your experience, Sebastian! This is very informative. The phrase “Exploit and Explore” summarizes it very well.
DO TODAY & SHAPE TOMORROW all the time!!
That is a good general rule to live by!
Great post about an important aspect quite often forgotten! I loved the definition of complacency as a silent killer; it is so true. It brings me back to thinking that within a team there always should be one person who plays the role of the exterior critic. That person doesn’t have to be necessarily a leader, but someone who has enough insight to counterpoint the popular narrative within a team. I’ve been in teams where such persons were disliked because they pushed others to think a bit more, and eventually the team had fallen into a trap of complacency. According to your opinion, Sebastian, what does a leader need to do and how do they need to structure their team in order to prevent the team from growing into the complacency mindset? I’m curious to hear from your experiences...