The New High-Performance Player
October 27, 2008
"Great Business Teams: Cracking the Code for Standout Performance," Chapter 3
By Howard M. Guttman
The Player as Leader/Influencer
At its simplest level, leadership is the art of getting others to do your bidding, or, more formally, it is "a process of influencing the activities of an individual or group in efforts of goal achievement." On a great business team, every member is expected to master the basic leadership skills needed to influence his or her teammates to achieve the highest level of performance.
Manuel Jessup, chief human resources officer at Chico’s, states it persuasively: "Once you have created a high-performance culture, you need to give people the skills to enable them to thrive in that culture. You have to have the right players, with innate ability. But regardless of how smart you are intellectually, if you don’t have the 'soft' skills such as active listening, assertion, and conflict management, it won’t work. For example, people who want to have a candid conversation, but don't possess conflict resolution skills, can’t do it effectively."
On any team, players require three types of skills: technical, strategic, and leadership. The need for the first two will vary according to an individual's position in the organization. But, as a member of a team of leaders, every player, on every great team, needs the same degree of proficiency in leadership skills, including the ability to influence others.
It's a lesson that David Waldock, senior vice president of sales for L'Oréal Paris, learned as he moved his team along the horizontal playing field. "When we began moving toward the high-performance model," says Waldock, we assumed too much. We thought people would get it and start using the leadership skills after a couple of formal sessions. What we didn't account for was that many members of our top team in Sales had been promoted because they had excellent technical and executional skills, but they were quite junior in the sense that they had less practice in leadership positions…We gave them as much additional exposure to and practice with the skills as time permitted."
Was the effort worth it? "It was invaluable," concludes Waldock. "I'm not sure we would be functioning well today if we hadn’t made the commitment we did. We have expanded our sales activities and brand initiatives. And we've done it without increasing headcount. Instead, we have learned to be much more efficient and much clearer in our communication. We get to conclusions much faster. We are no longer a team just on paper, working independently. We have a real group dynamic now, and it’s a good one."
Looking into the Mirror
An important key to influencing others is to be acutely aware of your own interpersonal behavior. First, how do you typically go about seeking to exert influence over others? No one's behavior pattern is the same in every situation, or with every person he or she meets. However, most of us usually operate within a limited area of the Behavioral Continuum.
We often ask teams to go through a simple exercise as a first step toward becoming aligned in the area of business relationships. Each player tells the group where his or her behavior falls on the continuum, and then the rest of the team weighs in. You'd be amazed at how often we see a huge disconnect between how a player views him- or herself and colleagues' perceptions. This is particularly true of people who are viewed as quite aggressive by others, yet see themselves as, at most, highly assertive.
Behavior in dealing with conflict is especially revealing. So, we also ask players to think about how they generally handle potentially contentious situations. We ask them to think about two dimensions: assertiveness and cooperativeness. Assertiveness is the extent to which a person attempts to satisfy his or her own needs. Cooperativeness is the extent to which an individual attempts to satisfy another person's needs.
Depending on the degree of balance they possess between these two elements, people tend to adopt one of five distinct methods of dealing with conflict:
1. Compete: be assertive and uncooperative, more interested in pursuing their own concerns at the expense of others.
2. Accommodate: be unassertive and cooperative, choosing to neglect their own concerns in order to satisfy the concerns of others.
3. Avoid: be unassertive and uncooperative, choosing not to take any action and allowing conflict to remain unresolved.
4. Compromise: be square in the middle in terms of both assertiveness and cooperativeness, resulting in a solution that may be mutually acceptable yet only partially satisfying to each side.
5. Collaborate: be both assertive and cooperative, willing to work together to find a solution that fully satisfies the concerns of each.
While players are thinking about how they prefer to deal with conflict, it's a good idea for them to also do some analysis of their peers' and leader's typical modus operandi in this area.
Armed with this increased knowledge about themselves and their peers, team members have a much better understanding of how much of a challenge it is going to be to successfully influence others to their point of view.
Skills: The Key to Building Relationships
Great team members recognize that it’s not enough for everyone on a team to agree on strategy, goals, roles, and protocols. Building solid business relationships is equally important. One executive we know uses the analogy of a family going on vacation: Yes, you have to know where you are going and what you want it to look like when you get there, but the question is, "When you put everybody in the car together, how is the trip going to unfold? How do people take the journey together?"
When we align a team around business relationships, we introduce them to the skills that they are going to need to address the interpersonal issues that are bound to surface during the journey. And there are always lots of them. Just like the vacationing family that can’t agree on the best route, when to stop for lunch, or which motel to pull into, team members will always have opinions and needs that will be at variance. And, while parents generally settle family differences, on great business teams it is unacceptable for the leader to serve in loco parenti; players are expected to resolve their own differences.
Regarding conflict management skills, John Doumani, now managing director, Fonterra, Australia-New Zealand, sums up his experience providing such skills when he was president, international for Campbell Soup:
Looking at conflict situations as part of the job, as a business case, doesn’t come easily, but it’s critical that people learn how to do it. They also need to become aware of the impact they have on others and to learn how to process the feedback they get from their colleagues. They don’t learn these lessons unless you are willing to put a lot of time and energy into modeling the behavior and building the skill base in the organization. We put in place quite a few conflict resolution and influence training modules—not just for the leadership team, but throughout the organization—as a way to get people moving in the right direction. At first, it was hard for people to change their behavior, but as people practiced the skills they became second nature. The way our organization viewed conflict, and dealt with it, really changed.
Howard M. Guttman is principal of Mt. Arlington, NJ-based Guttman Development Strategies, Inc. This article is an excerpt from his most recent book, "Great Business Teams: Cracking the Code for Standout Performance" (www.greatbusinessteams.com), published in June 2008 by John Wiley. His previous book, "When Goliaths Clash: Managing Executive Conflict to Build a More Dynamic Organization," recently was republished in paperback.
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