Why is my Leadership Team underperforming?

Leadership and Management

by Creating Dynamic
September 22, 2023

A successful Leadership Team is built on trust, clarity, and communication. By fostering these qualities within your team, you empower each member to challenge the status quo and deliver the innovation your company needs to thrive.

As the name suggests, the goal of a Leadership Team is to lead. This may seem self-evident, but creating an environment where that’s possible can challenge even the most experienced manager. Competing personalities can clash and gradually a team that should be open, honest, and innovative becomes closed, stifled, and stuck in a rut. So, what’s at the heart of these problems and what can you do to put them right? Here are five key areas to consider.

A lack of trust

No relationship, either professional or personal, can succeed without trust. We still carry with us the survival instincts of our ancestors: just as their lives were focused on avoiding sabretooth tigers, we focus on the threat of losing status at work or feeling embarrassed in a meeting. As a result, we may be less willing to speak out even in situations where we feel we have something important to offer. Building trust from the outset solves this issue. When members of a group trust, and have the trust of their peers, they’re less likely to fear rejection or humiliation and so will open up more freely. Trust can come from time spent outside of work, solving problems inside of work, or the employer/employee exchanges needed for psychological safety, but however it’s built, it’s critical to your team’s success.

An inability to self-reflect

We’ve all wondered how much better things would be if an external factor were different. Maybe if a colleague were easier to deal with? Or a step in the process were simpler to complete? It’s an easy and comforting trap to fall into because it means we don’t need to reflect upon our own actions or do anything to improve upon them. Everyone can benefit from a little honest self-reflection. By considering our own strengths and weaknesses – perhaps looking at how easy we are to communicate with or assessing our own contribution to a faltering process – we can become better professionals and better members of a team. Encouraging your team to be honest with themselves before considering external factors can remove the inertia that forces so many teams into a rut.

A fixed mindset

Such self-reflection is easier for people with the right mindset. According to Stanford University’s Carol Dweck, people have either a Growth Mindset or a Fixed Mindset. Those with a Growth Mindset see skills as learnable. They believe that with the right amount of time and dedication, they can develop whatever abilities they need to succeed. Those with a Fixed Mindset see skills as innate. They believe that people are born with certain abilities and that no amount of time or dedication can develop them. A Growth Mindset is critical to any good manager and a Fixed Mindset toxic, both to the manager individually and the team collectively. Fixed Mindsets limit learning, resilience, and adaptability, and eventually, that seeps into the rest of the Leadership Team and the business as a whole. Identifying those with Fixed Mindsets, understanding where their thinking comes from, and helping them develop a more open approach creates more positivity and gets them looking ahead to what’s possible.

A failure to deal with conflict

Conflict is never easy. We speak up when we passionately feel that we have the solution or at least something of value to offer; few of us run into conflict if we don’t. As a result, reason tends to take a back seat, emotion rules, and tempers can flare. Not handling such a situation with the necessary tact can only make things worse and lead to the lack of trust we’ve previously addressed. No employee will trust a group that doesn’t respect their opinion. Each of us deals with conflict in our own way. Some are competitive and consider only how they can get their way or the way they feel is best for the group as a whole. Others are more conciliatory, looking to find balance and a way for everyone to feel like their thoughts have been taken into account. Not every conflict can lead to this kind of balanced resolution, but by helping your Leadership Team understand the different approaches to conflict, you can create the kind of positive differences that innovative companies need to succeed.

A lack of objectivity

We spend a lot of time with our colleagues. Eight hours a day, five days a week, some fifty-odd weeks of the year. During that time we see the same people and the same groups, and this can lead to the same kind of thinking. Good ideas might be rejected because they’ve previously not worked, maybe for trivial or solvable reasons, and bad ones might take root because nobody with an objective viewpoint is on hand to offer a second opinion.

Employers and employees need to invite feedback like this. Perhaps a faltering Leadership Team could open themselves to constructive criticism from staff or direct reports through an anonymous survey, or maybe a third party could be introduced to honestly assess performance and provide useful tips on moving forwards. However it’s done, often the solution to a struggling team sits beyond the team itself.

Find out how Creating Dynamic helped one company thrive through Traction and get in touch to discover how we can do the same for you.

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