The Motive - Why So Many Leaders Abdicate Their Most Important Responsibilities
Recently, I had the opportunity to be part of a discussion with Patrick Lencioni, international best-seller of more than three million leadership books including such notable titles as, “The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team.” His new book, “The Motive,” was just released. This spurred me to think about what it means to be a CEO/Entrepreneur of a people-focused organization.
Prior to the onslaught of COVID-19, much of the US business scene was characterized as “soft, inhuman and out-of-touch” according to Lencioni. The pandemic has proven to be both relentless and the great equalizer, assaulting everything and everyone in its path. During these challenging times, CEOs were unceremoniously invited – read, “to step-up” – to get their teams and their businesses through this crisis. And it’s not over yet.
Leaders that have become more deeply engaged with their employees and forged stronger connections through a shared COVID experience are citing a unique combination of emotional exhaustion and elation – because they know that they themselves, and how they operate their businesses, has forever changed. And this is good. Very good, in fact as we all aspire to learn and grow. For me, it was an unprecedented opportunity to both pause and reflect, as well as to engage with my team more deeply than I have ever had the time to do before. Recognizing my own vulnerability helped me to understand some of what my team might be feeling. Through conversation and engagement, I’ve learned a lot from InRhythmers and have made adjustments, both personally and professionally, in response to what I’ve learned.
Lencioni challenges CEOs to question our motives, why do we lead? Are we rewards-centered leaders or are we responsibility-centered leaders? If we’re in the former category, even some of the time, there is a business imperative for us to evaluate what we must do to shift our leadership efforts to be more responsibility-centric. Operating a people-focused organization requires this. It’s not just about our executive team or our engineers and other colleagues, it’s also about the clients that we service and their clients and the impact on the larger society. We need to consider this bigger picture in all that we do. When we consider everything in context, and fully own up to all the responsibilities of being a CEO and being an entrepreneur in a people-focused organization, our reward is greater employee engagement, loyalty, productivity and innovation.
My quick take-away from Lencioni’s book, which I highly recommend calls out CEOs for five behaviors that often need improvement, are too often delegated and even more shockingly, regular abdicated:
We need to have those uncomfortable conversations;
We need to truly manage our direct reports;
We must own the responsibility for building an effective leadership team;
The meetings that we call must be for the right reasons;
The leader must be the chief reminding officer: “Constant, incessant, reminder of the company's purpose, strategy, values, and priorities. You must over-communicate.
We need to think about engagement on all levels; the engagement of our teams, our clients and the experience with our technology. That holistic preview is essential so that we understand – and we communicate to others – that everything we do is interrelated. We have to be unified, one team, one goal, working together in harmony in order to achieve the desired outcome – true impact.