Championship Teams vs All Star Teams
More and more, the basic unit of success for the organization is not the individual, but the team. Knowing how to build effective teams and operate in one is essential. In an interview with my friend Stephane Carbonnier, the Chief HR Officer of L’Oreal USA, we discussed the idea of the “intact” team.
The “intact” team is highly cohesive, competent, efficient, and effective. In short, these are the kind of teams every organization hopes for--and one, I’m sure, we’d all love to work on. But, so often, good teams feel like luck. When they’re assembled based solely on competency, the “magic” of the intact team might be lost. So, how can we bypass luck and stack the deck in favor of creating meaningful team units?
Knowing our superpowers--our innate, inimitable gifts, talents, and skills--is how we built intact teams. Cohesive teams comprise more than just competent individuals. They need people who have deep self-awareness and know their core strengths and how those strengths operate together. That is: Great teams are not just a mass of great individuals.
As US Secretary of Defense, General Lloyd Austin, once posed - “Are you building an all star team or a championship team?”
What is valued in individual performance might not be what matters the most in teamwork. Emotional acumen, psychological security, and dependability are what make for a great team, and one way to ensure these attributes are present is by spending time learning about your own individual superpower and those of your teammates.
Understanding our unique superpower and how we best fit on a team gives us the language to form teams more intentionally, upping the odds of success--and not relying on luck and sheer will to form a team.
The irony is that sometimes superpowers are most easily detected in team units because others are able to notice our gifts and talents in action. It’s crucial to form a habit of telling others what strengths you see in them so that they can 1) learn their superpower, 2) understand more fully how they fit in a team unit, and 3) get on the path to team cohesion.
Curiosity is a Superpower we can all cultivate for leading our organization to the next level. I loved talking with the brilliant hosts of the The Curious Advantage about superpowers, how curiosity plays into executive coaching, and my why for what I do. One of the coolest things that podcast hosts Simon Brown, Paul Ashcroft and Garrick Jones do is create a visual of the podcast! I got to know Simon through his work as Chief Learning Officer for Novartis, where I’m a member of the Novartis’ Culture Leadership Advisory Board.
In Simon's words, here are the key takeaways from our conversation.
Sanyin is driven by her mission in life to 'enable greatness in others'
How she learns something new every three years
How she became a LinkedIn influencer with 1m+ followers
What role does curiosity play in #coaching? Spoiler: Everything!
Getting involved in investing with startups and sports teams, and working with private equity
What is a Curious Career and could this become our next book!
Messages from her book 'The Launch Book' - how to get beyond the fear of failure
How the questions we ask can tell more about us than the answers we give
How self-doubt can be powerful in the right proportions
Are leaders creating the environment for people to be vulnerable enough to demonstrate their curiosity? Sanyin shares her tips to create this environment.
Why we have to leverage employees curiosity across an organisation
Context, community and confidence - what role do they play today?
How does she intuit trends from talking to diverse communities and use it to inform her work with investors
Listen to the podcast episode here and pick up a copy of their book The Curious Advantage!
"In a well-intended effort to build cohesive teams, employers might end up building homogeneous teams. Employers might conflate unity with uniformity... When we can see our innate, instinctive and inimitable strengths more clearly, the definition of a ‘good team’ shifts.
Our teams begin to rely not on individuals, but on individuals-in-context. Our teams begin to rely on diversity to function. Our teams develop collective superpowers."
In my Last Word column for Dialogue Review, an executive journal published by Duke Corporate Education (DukeCE) for more than a million readers, I dive deeper into how superpowers and teams connect.
Thank you for reading this issue of Leadership Playbook: Unleashing Your Superpowers! A reason for me in writing this newsletter is to refine the ideas that I’m working on. But I need your help. To do that best, I’d love to know what question you may have on each issue, or how it applies to your situation. Please email questions to me at CoachSanyin@gmail.com and share your feedback with me. THANK YOU!
And superpowers builds on my earlier work - The Launch Book. I believe the hero of every book is the reader. So, each issue, I’ll share a picture from a reader of The Launch Book. Paid subscribers receive a special monthly issue containing the audio of an excerpt from a chapter each month.