The Fight Club Experiment
In my work with leaders who are early in career, one of the things we focus on is raising a sense of accountability in the teams they lead. I find that teams who get accountability right do things like:
Front up to asking hard questions of each other and the work each person is contributing to;
Be honest about what’s not quite gelling or making sense; and
Genuinely and deeply support each other to achieve success
It’s so important, I get those leaders to run a focused experiment that brings that stuff out. We call it the Fight Club experiment. It’s a concept I took from my days in the Creative HQ Business Incubator, who in turn borrowed the name from a movie you may have heard of. I was working for then start-up and now industry leader, StarNow.com and while there were no fists involved, the idea was to expose, to other start-ups, in a closed-door session, an initiative you were planning on bringing to market. In return, you got rigorous questions, candid honesty about what others outside your own business thought of your idea, and a genuine intent to help identify issues or really tell you if it was time to pull the pin on it. It’s a bit like Pixar’s legendary Braintrust, described by Ed Catmull in his inside-Pixar book, Creativity, Inc., and it’s really hard to do. Getting people to be open and honest about how things are going in the team flicks all sorts of defensive mechanisms on. It requires courage, vulnerability and a focus on playing the issue, not the person. But taking on the challenge as a team means you solve the right challenges more effectively.
So how do we do it with leaders and their teams? Small steps:
Team members individually pick a challenge that they feel is getting in the way of the team really nailing high performance
As a team, they decide which of the issues to focus on, decide what successful progress would look like at the end of a week, then make a plan to take action.
It always starts pretty safe, but as teams build up momentum and realise the value of candour, they become more forthright in what they want to change. Over time, the big stuff gets addressed, and team members get better at being accountable to each other.
Try it out with your team – ask them each to pick one thing they reckon the team is doing (or not doing) that is holding the team back at the moment, Then pick a challenge, decide what you want to have knocked off in a week, and review and reset your targets next week. Give it a crack, and see what changes!
I’m kicking off a Wellington-based series in April for leaders who are early in career. You’ll get what you need to accelerate from emergent to potent, including:
Group coaching sessions with me;
12 experiments to run at work, based on common challenges leaders face when they are starting out;
The chance to build your own network of people who are at a similar stage to you in their leadership adventure.
I’ve got a couple of spaces left for people who are up for the stretch - hit the button below to send me an email if you want more info!