What if everyone on your Senior Executive team is not on the same page? What if there are doubts, upsets, withholds? To solidify your team’s performance basics, discuss one topic each week, quarter after quarter. These timeless, essential, generative questions are never tired or tiring. You can rely on them to keep your uppermost priorities fresh and top of mind. Like leafy green vegetables replenish our bodies, these questions will nourish your team’s performance.
Question #1
How do I, and our team, measure our effectiveness as leaders? Do we do this on a regular basis? How often?
Definition: Conscious leadership that gives room for and encourages employees, customers, vendors and any other stakeholders to speak their truth to power, even when — in fact especially when — it is bad news.
Excellence at the top of the organization requires rigorous review, congruence and application of accountability standards, two-way communications (internal and external) and transparency in guiding the organization and receiving feedback from all levels in the organization. Executive Excellence includes values-based decision-making and authenticity. Mutual respect is a key value ad building block of executive excellence. These qualities foster trust.
“The leaders who work most effectively, it seems to me, never say ‘I.’ And that’s not because they have trained themselves not to say ‘I.’ The don’t think ‘I.’ They think ‘we’; they think ‘team.’ They understand their job to be to make the team function. They accept responsibility and don’t sidestep it, but ‘we’ gets the credit. This is what creates trust, what enables you to get the task done.” — Peter F. Drucker
