This must be right, McKinsey said it.
When the top team is working together towards a common vision they are twice as likely of having above-median financial performance. And executives are five times more productive when working in a high performing team than they are in an average one.
Sounds about right to me and McKinsey are a class act, have considerable worldwide resource and experience and have done the research to back it up. I believe them.
Over the past decade they have asked more than five thousand executives about their peak experience as a team member and report the results are remarkably consistent and reveal three key dimensions of great team working:
- Alignment on direction
- High quality interaction and
- Strong sense of renewal
Reflecting, this is exactly what I promote and sustain when working with top teams that are running a business or a joint venture or delivering a big construction project
First up they have to align on where they are going, their collective view of future success. This establishes direction, “this is where we are headed together”. It takes account of their individual drivers and arrives at a common vision. I have been helping business boards, project leadership teams and warring factions arrive at a common vision for about twenty years; it’s pretty easy when you get down to it, though it takes a bit of setting up. Having a common vision is essential, it gets the team pointing in the same direction and leading the ‘people’ accordingly. If the top team is pointing in different directions then everyone is working in different directions and often that is how it is.
“Alignment” is really interesting, while weaker than “agreement”, it still gets lost. I regularly work with teams that were aligned, though a few months on people are off down different paths. The stuff of business simply gets in the way. Alignment is dynamic, sustaining it needs work.
Then there is high quality interaction; McKinsey talks about trust, open communication and a willingness to embrace conflict. That would be great! For me, if the team had a fairly open and collective conversation about progress made from where they started and how they all felt about it that would be a fine start. That is what I enable in monthly reviews and quarterly follow ups – and the energy goes up and trust builds over time. Some Boards tell me that prior to our work they only ever got together once every three months to talk about “the numbers” and the problems with them and the rest of the time they were working in their own silos. Maybe that’s what McKinsey means by an ‘average team’?
And then the third element of “great team working” – a strong sense of renewal. Some of the teams I work with come back after a bruising quarter, members feeling exhausted and confused with a million things on their mind. An MD recently said to me “Dave it’s like we are visiting the front line medical tent to get patched up”. This is not uncommon in the work I do with top teams, though a day invested in coming up for air, appreciating progress made, realigning and refreshing their forward-looking plan works every time. They leave with that sense of renewal, ready and together for the next step towards their common vision.
Though do they get there?
McKinsey quotes above-median financial performance and improved exec productivity, great, but what about delivery of the common vision – the Result?
My work is consistently focused on the top team’s business result and the teams that have followed my process, done the work and stayed the course have delivered remarkable results. They got there! This must be right, my customers said it.
For case studies on my customers’ remarkable results and what they said, visit www.dsabuilding.co.uk
To read the full McKinsey article click here