Gigi and Greg

Performance is definitely the direction we all want to take with our teams, right? We want our teams to perform at the highest level. But in order to get there, we will have to have some oversight. (I didn’t want to say “management.”)

Our leadership team here in Canada just had a leadership meeting. 3 days off-site for some intensive time to recalibrate and refocus on our key tasks. The theme of our time together was “Healthy Oversight.” Oversight is critical to any team’s ability to perform effectively. One of the main functions of oversight is to guarantee that the team stays focused on its own core vision. We were very encouraged by Murray Taylor’s message about staying true to our core purpose.

Southwest Airlines’ purpose (from their website) is to: “Connect People to what’s important in their lives through friendly, reliable, and low-cost air travel.” It’s easy to imagine how Southwest could drift from “friendly,” or from “reliable,” or from “low-cost.” On the other hand, “The Salvation Army exists to share the love of Jesus Christ, meet human needs and be a transforming influence in the communities of our world.” Maybe you thought that the Salvation Army existed to recycle used clothes and furniture. You could be forgiven for thinking that.

It’s called Mission Drift, and Murray recommended we read Peter Greer’s book of the same name. Our job is to stay laser-focused on the purpose of our team or organization. Our job as leaders is to keep our teammates focused on the team’s core purpose. Look above at Southwest’s purpose statement. One sentence, one line. One of your first jobs as a team must be to hone your common vision into a form that is brief and clear, so that each team member can remember and return to it.

I recall a time years ago when one national office of a multinational charity began to drift. The country director wrote to me and asked if I thought there was adequate accountability across the membership. I went back to the emails of numerous members who had disagreed with the direction change the country director was proposing. Almost 100% of those emails referenced the core values of the organization which had been formalized at its inception. I replied to the national director that while he was citing nonprofit law in his country, his membership was more focused on the core purpose of the company. They were holding the director accountable to the nonprofit’s policies and principles. The national director had allowed himself to drift from the core direction of his international organization.

I guess the moral is, “Remember what you’re about, and keep reminding your team what they are all about.”

Do you ever feel like the woman in the picture?

Don’t we all sometimes. I had committed to blogging 5 days a week for 2 months to fill this space up with helpful information. With travel, family commitments, visits to friends and some lesson prep, that all fell apart within 2 weeks. The tyranny of the urgent got me.

But we don’t have to be slaves of the urgent, even if you, like me have adult ADHD. (For those who are doubters, it’s a real thing… but more on that later.)

Steven Covey, in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, writes about ordering you day (and your life). He makes a distinction between the urgent and the important, and he makes it into a matrix. (If you don’t know what a matrix is, don’t worry; it just works out to 4 different categories:

1. The Urgent-Important which Covey calls “Crises.” These don’t come frequently, but they absolutely have to be addressed. I would call these “dumpster fires.” Drop everything and get it done!
2. Then there are the urgent but unimportant which Covey calls “Interruptions.” I don’t know about you, but my brain needs these sometimes to just break up my time with a chat, a cup of coffee, a washroom visit, etc.
3. Unimportant-nonurgent tasks would be distractions. Online shopping or video watching, things which can pull you in and get you totally off-task for no reason, or even get you disciplined at work.
4. The most central tasks are those that are important but not urgent. These are tasks related to your longterm goals and planning. Not urgent because these are LONG term tasks. Being long term, though means they help frame the BIG picture. These are the activities that will ultimately make the most difference in your life.

We can all fall into the trap of spending time on Crises, interruptions and Distractions, while neglecting the central tasks of planning, setting goals and investing time and energy into those goals. If we are to achieve our goal of building great teams to do great works, we will have to structure our days weeks and months around planning first, and then investing time, energy and thought toward the goals that will get us there. Like anything worthwhile, this will not be easy. It will, in fact be painful.

You and I will have to evaluate whether the eventual payoff is worth the cost of saying no to interruptions and distractions while bumping up planning and focusing on our long term goals. How do we do this? Patience, tenacity and flexibility. We have to live like desert chollas in order to leave our mark on the world.

This weekend, I listened to one of my favorite leadership guys, Craig Groeschel. He was talking about the importance of Feedback in any organization (Giving and receiving Feedback, Part 1). I looked for an image to illustrate this idea, but I was unsatisfied. all the images were about us receiving individual feedback from our work, our designs or our clients. When I think feedback, the type of feedback I want to get is from you, my peers, my colleagues, and yes, my clients as well. What do you like about this blog? What can I do better? What have you been able to apply directly to your team or your future team?

Two things stood out to me from Craig’s thoughts on Feedback: 1) Feedback is everywhere, in a colleague’s smirk, a comment on social media, a smile, a scowl, a baby’s angry cry, an insult from your teenager, an angry email, but helpful feedback is RARE. 2) Instead of dreading feedback, we should crave it. How can we improve if there is no one to fill in our blind spots.

I remember as a teenager, I had the privilege of doing a 12 minute talk at church. There were 3 of us each doing our part, and we all practiced and critiqued each other. Yes, I dreaded hearing what my peers would say about my talk. Well, sure enough, they told me, “Greg, you have this weird tick when you talk, you kind of grit your teeth and stretch your throat out like a toad…” Ugh, that was hard to hear, but I had never noticed that I did that.

They helped me to see what I couldn’t see myself.

That’s why we need each other. That’s why we should be craving feedback from others. They see what we don’t. Their perspectives helps us to grow beyond where we can go with only our own perspective. It’s not fun getting critiqued. It can be painful. It’s almost always painful if it’s profitable. So, come at me, let me know what I can do better at! I need to grow. I have blind spots. I need your feedback.

Some of you who know me also know that I am obsessed with err, enjoy cultivating Bonsai trees. Some people think that Bonsai is either a particular species of little tree, or that the pot stunts the tree’s growth. Neither is true.

A Bonsai is small because it is pruned, meticulously and consistently by its grower.

The result is (or is at least supposed to be) a tree that looks ancient and weathered even though it may not be as old as it appears. The picture above shows the theoretical progression of a tree in a pot (Bonsai means “tree in a pot” in Japanese). You see how it works? Grow the trunk out; cut it off; grow out the next branch, cut it off; etc, etc, etc…

I’ve had the chance to build numerous teams over my life. Every time, I thought, “This is the pinnacle; this is as good as it gets! I’m really in my strike zone.” Then comes a pruning. Sometimes it is abrupt and painful. Years ago, a broken engagement providentially redirected my life into a totally new direction. Sometimes it’s more gradual, like our move from Africa to Europe — we knew it was coming, but we had to make that break (pruning) at a given stage of our life.

Like that bonsai, a pruning can strengthen the root base, even though the top of the tree has to come off. And pruning is inevitable in all of our lives. It can even be like the Cholla: a pruning can lead to reproduction. We have seen that kind of pruning too. When a pruning comes, try not to flinch. It may be painful (probably will be…), but if pruning doesn’t kill you, it will probably lead to growth and to new opportunities.

Here’s a picture of one of my Bonsai trees for fun:

Several years ago, I joined a new leadership team in our organization. Since every team has a character as unique as any person, I was a bit uncertain as to how the team would function. In addition, like most of the teams I’ve been a part of, it was a multicultural team, consisting of 4 different nationalities, and 3 different heart languages. Of course, we functioned perfectly right from the start and throughout our 5 years of working together. (Hahahaha!) But we can talk about that later…

I was immediately struck by the realization that our single core task was to communicate effectively. We oversaw about 175 individuals working in the African desert (the Sahara, the Sahel, and the Savannah), but if you’ve read about Chollas you know that the desert is a place where resources are thin, and “the heat is on.” We had to effectively communicate to our workers who had to communicate with their teams. We also had to communicate effectively to our superiors and sometimes to other stakeholders.

In part because our workers came from 25 different countries and represented 6 different mother tongues, and in part because they were all members of the human race, clear and effective communication was an exceedingly complex and demanding task. We also had to build effective habits of communication within our leadership team. I have to say that in the end, our successful communication habits perhaps barely outweighed our failures and miscommunication.

A major complicating factor was differing expectations between all the parties,
but that’s a subject for another post.

Communication in orgs is like fishbones times ten. Every message filters downward and upward through individuals. And every stage of this process is a branching, an opportunity for misunderstanding and degradation of the original message. Check for understanding! If you aren’t constantly checking for understanding, your team will be ineffective in it’s core purpose: effective communication. Remember, this principle applies whether you’re running an auto supply shop in Schenectady, serving refugees in Kenya or managing a computer design house in Silicone Valley. Communicate; overcommunicate. You won’t be sorry.

When I was growing up, I remember our mom singing this song over and over:

Count your blessings, name them one by one
Count your blessings, see what God hath done!

(Click the link if you’ve never heard the song…)

I have to admit, I got rather sick of the song, and of my mom reminding me to count my blessings. But this song has a deep lesson for those of us living, working and teambuilding in the desert, whether it is the Nubian desert or the proverbial concrete desert.

It’s often discouraging here in the desert (wherever that may be for you).

Count your blessings. Jim Wilder, in his book Rare Leadership in the workplace writes about starting your day with an appreciation exercise. An appreciation exercise means focusing on something or someone you feel thankful for, and settling into those things about it, him or her that you appreciate. If you are a person of faith, you can do this in prayer. Or you can just enter a reflective, calm state and reflect on those things you’re thankful for. Gigi often writes down a list of things she appreciates in her journal.

Appreciation works for us in the desert because it has a direct impact on our brains. Appreciation boosts neurotransmitter production, regulates stress hormones; it actually restructures our cognitive processes, enhances neural connectivity and activates several critical areas of the brain.

What’s amazing is that even when a person is so discouraged that they can’t think of anything they are thankful for, the simple act of trying to be thankful for something actually triggers all of these responses in their brain. When I read about that in Jim Wilder’s book, it blew my mind (no pun intended).

But enough talking. Let’s try it. Set aside 10-15 minutes today to be thankful. It will make such a difference that you’ll be anxious to do it tomorrow too. Exercising appreciation will make you a better leader, a better person and it will combat discouragement in your life. Another favorite song from my early years contains the line, “Don’t try to drive the darkness out, you just turn on the light!” Turn on the light of appreciation today; you may need your sunglasses.

Here’s a picture of a cholla garden in the Mojave desert in California:

Cholla cactus in the Mojave desert. It’s hard to imagine a more challenging environment. The plants themselves have a certain beauty. They look soft and faintly glowing in the picture. But, in order to survive, they have to reproduce. If you have ever walked past a Cholla cactus, you know how they do it. Those lovely little yellow puff-balls break off rather easily. You can’t pass within a meter of a Cholla without having a stickery stowaway stuck to your pant-leg or boot. If you’re a coyote, it’s stuck in your fur. And off it goes to find a new home, to wait 6 or 12 months for the next tiny rainfall when it can take root and grow and sent off new burrs out into the wide world.

Cholla are patient. And they thrive in one of the most hostile environments on the planet. If you want to build a team in the desert (whether it’s the African desert, or the concrete desert), you will have to be patient. Cholla are resilient. Their DNA will last months in the arid wastes of the Mojave. Cholla are adapted to their world. Their spines are barbed so that they will tenaciously stick to whatever they touch: skin, fur, clothing, etc.

If we hope to be successful in building teams in tough contexts, we will need patience, we will need resilience and we will need to be adaptable. How can you build those different aspects into your habits so that they will eventually become part of your character? You can do it, but it will be painful and it will require both intentionality and discipline. As my Québécois friends love to say, “Let’s go!”

Gigi and Greg spent 17 years building a multicultural team that could respond to the needs of poor and marginalized African peoples. After multiple failed attempts, we all learned to work together toward a common vision, and we produced! They later moved their family to Spain where they continued their work coaching leaders to build teams in some of the harshest settings imaginable: with 45°C heat, many hours from a major city, and poor or no running water.

Many of the teams they coached have had incredible longevity in their locations, and have built durable and compassionate solutions for their African neighbors.

The core principles of team building apply to your context too. Because teams are more about human interaction than they are about a particular context, the main ideas can make a difference whatever your situation. We hope that you will join us as we explore the ideas that can lead you to great teamwork and great results.

This site is about building great teams in the harshest settings. It’s what I’ve been doing for more than half of my life. Patrick Lencioni (you’ll run into him a lot here) said, “It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare.” Take a second to stop and think about that. I would rephrase that statement this way,

“If your team is functioning effectively, you will achieve your goals,
if they are indeed achievable.”

You’ll achieve your goals because you’ll all have each others’ backs. When I fail in my role, another team member will backstop me and make sure the task gets done. The enemy of success is isolation. No one is “better off on their own,” at least as far as achieving productive work. I want to take you on a journey toward building your own team’s top performance.

I believe that men and women were created to work and to take joy in the work of their hands. And, it is in teamwork that we can achieve our greatest successes.