Here are 14 signs that your leadership team might not actually be a well-functioning team:

1. Being merely a bundle of ‘reporting lines’ without shared work

2. Top leader(s) chairs their meeting and speaks most

3. Constant rabbit-holing and talking past each other

4. Spend most of their time reviewing PowerPoints

5. Members have many 1:1s with each other outside shared meeting time

6. Their meeting is canceled when the top leader isn’t present

7. Pleasing the leader, optics to get a promotion

8. Top leader(s) have the ‘final say’ on all decisions

9. Are involved in status update marathons

10. Are in endless meetings that could have been async emails/chat/videos

11. Maintains endless lists of ‘priorities’ that are mere ‘wishlists’

12. A mindset of striving for perfection, planning & controlling

13. Elephants in the room are left unaddressed

14. Blaming your people for the lack of results

Now, contrast this with the best ones I’ve ever seen:

Deciding

1. Ask

clarifying questions before reacting

1. Ask: ‘

is it safe-to-try’ instead of ‘is it perfect’?

1. Use a different process for

reversible and irreversible decisions

1. Clarity on which types of decisions need group consent and which don’t

Improving

1. Spend monthly recurring time for reflecting on and improving the team

2. Team works ‘on’ the organization: running experiments to improve its Operating System

3. Feedback is flowing freely between members

4. Member’s learning goals are shared openly to help each other achieve them

Strategy

1. Members have participated and co-created the strategy

2. The strategy contains clear trade-offs, clarity on what NOT to do

3. Uses cycles of ’90 day outcomes’ that they are working against together

4. Reviews steering metrics to know if their shared work is progressing

Meetings

1. Their meeting routine drives the work forward

2. Uses a tool like Trello, Notion, or Planner to capture projects and actions

3. The role of the meeting facilitator rotates between members

4. Uses asynchronous workflow: chat/audio/video for updates and unblocking

Behaving

1. Equal talking time; everyone makes proposals

2. Disagreement is seen as an opportunity to explore multiple truths

3. Members name feelings and hold space for processing tension

4. Models the behavior shift they’d like to see in the rest of their organization

The red thread: participation, co-creation, equality, adult-adult, accountability, consent, continuous change.

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