POTENT LEADERS
COACHING SERIES
Accountability: potent teams front up
Congrats on making it through to the end of the Potent Leaders Coaching Series! This is our last organised experiment and, as always at the end of a theme, it’s your supercharger for creating an environment of accountability in your team.
When everything is going smoothly, it’s easy to be a team that gets along with each other. It’s when those uncomfortable, hard to talk about, elephant in the room issues arise that potent teams come into their own. Failing to deal with these gnarly issues when they arise undermines the hard work you’ve done to build belonging in your team. Then people start to have doubts about what they can safely raise, leading in turn to questions about how safe it is to take on challenges that are stretchy and uncomfortable - questions like, “if we can’t deal with this issue, how will other things that aren’t working be dealt with?” Potent teams run towards that conflict. They know it can be messy, but they also know that to ignore it is a destructive tactic.
This is the Fight Club experiment. There are - of course - no bare knuckles involved. It comes from time I spent in a business incubator, where we regularly held what were called Fight Club sessions around the ideas each business was intending to bring to market. In a polite world, everyone agrees, nods their head, and potential issues don’t get dealt with until they annoy a customer. In a Fight Club world, people ask hard questions early on, potential fish hooks get surfaced, and conflict is resolved. It can be daunting and there might be a few ego bruises, but you come out the other side with clarity and direction This experiment challenges you to do the same thing with your team. Invite them to talk about anything that’s holding the team back right now, dig into it with them using the attached experiment guide, and come up with some ways forward.
Your team will probably start pretty safe, but once they see that uncomfortable stuff can be dealt with in an empathic and productive way, you’ll open the door to anything that’s holding your team back and might not otherwise have been raised.
Finally, it’s time to take five minutes to complete your final self assessment. If you’d like your manager to complete their own assessment of your progress, you can send them this link to the manager assessment: https://www.jeremyleslie.co.nz/potent-leader-manager-assessment
Check out the resources and video for running this experiment below.
