Successful companies are almost invariably backed by an effective executive team whose dynamics and quality of collaboration determine the direction of the entire organization. However, the executive team's operation isn't just about strategic decision-making – it's a complex network of human relationships where different personalities, temperaments, and operating methods interact daily. These interactions can either create the foundation for exceptional success or become its most significant obstacle.
Based on Patrick Lencioni's research, five key factors have been identified that distinguish high-performing executive teams from mediocre ones. In these successful teams, trust, courage to disagree, commitment, accountability, and results-orientation form a mutually supportive whole. Particularly interesting is how these success factors connect to interpersonal interaction and the ability to leverage the strengths of different personalities. Successful executive team work isn't about avoiding conflicts but constructively utilizing them to achieve a common goal.
Has your executive team genuinely stopped to consider the factors that led to success or those issues that continuously seem to cause friction? Have you, through success analysis, broken down into atoms the components that explain success or those that prevent success and implementation?
Do you discuss behavior and actions using language that describes behavior without abstract and vague concepts that everyone interprets based on their past experiences? What if, going forward, we actually talked about things using terms that mean what they say and required less interpretation?
When attending executive team meetings, I've often heard the phrase "Surely everyone here understands what this means." But what if people genuinely don't understand, but instead interpret, assume based on their own experiences, or need more information? How do you ensure in your own executive team that everyone has a shared understanding of what is being done, why, and when?
Communication is the core issue of success in all interpersonal relationships. When measuring executive team successes or company performance, it's very often a question of how interpersonal relationships and communication function. Good leadership and executive teamwork isn't just good people management, but above all good management of relationships between people. The ability to lead oneself and one's own emotions can tremendously impact relationships within the executive team and the trust and communication culture that prevails within it.
Let's deepen our thinking a bit more in the next section.
Patrick Lencioni has extensively studied successful organizations and their executive teams. He has been able to identify five significant themes that explain why things work or don't work.
Lencioni's list is very simple:
With functional interaction and dialogue, these five things flow in all their simplicity like a fiery and temperamental tango; in good rhythm and with the right beat. With dysfunctional interaction, toes get stepped on, sometimes dancing quite separately from the partner or other dancers. There may still be enough fire and temperament in the dance, but how does it support success or achievement? Unfortunately, it doesn't at all. On the contrary, it only creates challenges, and fears of making mistakes begin to prevent trying new moves.
Very often, our actions or inactions are justified by our temperament and personality. These things certainly affect each person's behavior, but we are always responsible for our behavior. How can we take responsibility for our own behavior, let alone someone else's? Unfortunately, we can influence another's behavior very little, but we can greatly influence what kind of emotions we create in others through our own actions. Since emotions and temperament guide our behavior a lot, what if we invested in our own behavior? By investing in self-knowledge, we can better control our own behavior and thereby improve communication and the entire executive team's functioning, as well as create a new culture.
I ask you to take a moment with your own values and what matters to you. Go back in your mind to your previous executive team meeting and consider the last emotion that arose for you during your team's meeting.
Why did that particular emotion arise in you?
Was it a warm and positive feeling that came from something meaningful to you being fulfilled?
If the feeling was negative and made you act in a certain way, consider what meaningful and important thing you were trying to defend with your reaction and actions?
Your temperament made you act as you did. Did you perhaps use heavier words than normal? Were you withdrawn and quiet? Did you shout with joy or perhaps just smile modestly?
Believe me, everyone else in your executive team operates with this same logic.
So, from a success and achievement perspective, the most challenges are brought by humans; temperament, personality, and behavior. At the same time, this is also what makes everything wonderful.
The better executive team members learn to recognize their own values and emotions, the more likely behavior can become more predictable. Temperament isn't what dictates behavior, but each person themselves.
It's possible to regulate the emergence of emotions stemming from human differences.
This is beautifully supported by Lencioni's five steps, which we'll walk through together in the next section.
Trust is one step in an executive team's success. Imagine in your mind or draw on paper an equilateral triangle. To be truly equilateral, each component of the triangle must constantly be in balance, or pieces will be cut off from the apex.
Arrange the following elements at the corners so they are identifiable factors describing behavior:
Genuine Respect for Other People
Through your behavior, you show that you value different views and opinions when discussing matters. This doesn't mean the other person's opinion is correct or that you should agree. However, you can give it value, and together you can consider what's essential and important in the other's thinking that you can incorporate to reach your common goal or objective.
Words and Promises
Remember to give only promises that you can be absolutely certain of fulfilling. If you've made too big a promise and realize you can't fulfill it, bring it up without hesitation as soon as possible. People rarely get upset about honestly clarifying an issue and making a new promise, but almost without exception, they get upset about breaking a promise.
Actions Consistent with Promises
Your actions demonstrate that you're worthy of trust. Trust is often discussed from an earning perspective, as if you were starting to collect trust in an empty vessel.
What if we changed the mindset so that trust is fundamentally a full glass?
Everyone can influence with their own actions whether the glass stays full or if it spills over and the glass empties.
Would a full glass already encourage more effort to maintain trust and work together, rather than an empty glass that requires effort to fill to achieve trust? If a small amount of developed trust spills away, the percentage and relative loss is much greater than spillage from a full glass. Thus, emotional reactions may be slightly more neutral and better proportioned to the actual deed.
Can emotions and differences be visible in the executive team? Of course they can and actually should. However, care must be taken here; emotions and behavior are not synonymous.
Emotions arise when defending something meaningful and important to oneself, its existence, or a threat to it. Emotions are always present when dealing with something meaningful and important to oneself. Negative emotions arise from threatening situations and the need to defend or protect. Positive emotions arise from the fulfillment of meaningful and important things. Simple, isn't it?
Different temperaments and personalities have quite different needs. What's important and meaningful to one person can be completely meaningless to another, something they couldn't care less about. Take tempo, for example. One values bold experimentation, a spirit of action, speed, and results. Another carefully considers the consequences of these things and may be more inclined to do "as has always been done" or act more deliberately and slowly.
Proper dialogue can, at its best, increase understanding and bring new perspectives to a common issue, while at worst, the lack of genuine dialogue causes unnecessary turbulence and a negative atmosphere.
Emotions should be visible because they make visible the important and meaningful things that people consider when making decisions and choices that guide action. The best decision-maker isn't the one who makes the most noise or has the weightiest arguments. Many excellent thoughts or arguments remain in the dark when someone with a different temperament hasn't wanted or had the energy to fight for their space to be heard.
Let your thoughts and feelings be heard and visible. They enrich your discussion, provide opportunities to find new perspectives, and discover things that weren't even known to exist. How we express our thoughts and feelings is the responsibility of behavior. Each person's view is equally valuable as you keep in focus why you're engaging in dialogue to reach a common goal and objective. Disagreement isn't about an individual's excellence and the correctness of thoughts, but about searching for the best solution – together.
It's very easy to understand that by participating in executive team work, a person automatically commits as well.
First, let's consider this from the perspective of a more withdrawn temperament. Imagine a situation where two or three people in an executive team meeting – in the worst case, just one – are talking 80% of the time, and the perspectives are mainly about their or his/her excellence. When you think about such a situation, consider at the same time how likely you are to put yourself on the line when deciding on this topic. If it should happen that the decision made doesn't turn out to be the most optimal, how easy it is to cast the first stone...
Regardless of temperament, there's always responsibility in an executive team. Responsibility in this context means that bringing up a difficult issue is part of responsibility. We cannot escape behind our temperament and comment afterward that "I strongly disagreed with the matter, but I didn't mention it because..." Speaking up is certainly not always easy, but it's part of the responsibility that a decision-maker inevitably always has.
Another example: Through good and functional dialogue, each participant has had their opinion and thoughts heard regarding decision-making. It's certainly self-evident that in this situation, no one needs to consider their commitment. Participation has brought with it responsibility-taking and the will to strive for a common goal and objective. It's therefore extremely easy to understand that participation commits and assigns responsibility in a good way. Let's ensure in the executive team that all voices are heard and responsibility is distributed, and not let temperaments dictate the executive team's success.
Forgetting is human, as long as it's not intentional forgetting or escaping responsibility. It's good to bring up forgetting, as long as it doesn't involve bolstering one's own excellence or causing shame to the one who forgot.
Failure to act or forgetting is always linked, willingly or unwillingly, to a piece of shame. Shame causes behavior that isn't the most constructive; hiding, defending, avoiding, explaining, apologizing, and counter-attacks. Temperament and personality have great significance as factors guiding behavior here as well.
The way we handle the theme of forgetting and the theme of "mistake" has great significance for how we dare to exist as part of a group. To do things, dare to even be silly, disagree, and many other things. Indifference or non-commitment to matters agreed upon together isn't linked to forgetting.
Sometimes we have to consider whether it's OK to ask how the progress of an agreed matter is going. Asking is OK, without creating a feeling of surveillance or distrust. It's more about functional dialogue and genuine interest in a common matter than distrust. It could indeed happen that the matter has been unintentionally forgotten, and when asked fairly, the colleague gets a chance to recall the matter without shame or fear of "getting caught" for not doing it. Jointly agreed ways of working and documenting and prioritizing tasks help reduce the likelihood of forgetting and standardize the group's operations.
Although this point is at the end of the list, it belongs both at the beginning and the end. Through the four preceding steps, results – often also called money – are the outcome. They belong at the beginning because when we start to create a shared reality, we need frameworks for action and doing. Results are often measured in euros or units. Often the goals are externally given, in which case our possibilities to influence them may be small. What's essential is to define how we together reach the goals set for us and can together rejoice in our successes.
The four steps described above, or perhaps rather ways of existing, strongly define reaching the end result. Only in individual sports is it possible to achieve top results alone, though rarely is it possible completely alone even in those. We need other people. Especially in executive team work, we are always responsible to the executive team, even if we are the leaders of a certain unit or silo. The contribution of one's own unit is naturally important, but we are one part of a bigger picture for which all units strive.
When one's own contribution as part of a larger whole has been properly made visible, it's also extremely rewarding to work and make an effort for success. At the same time, it's an excellent opportunity to apply this same model in one's own leadership. Make the goals and objectives of your own team members visible. At the same time, make visible how they concretely connect to the big picture, and you'll be more likely to motivate people and commit them better.
Let's summarize what this is all about in its simplest form when thinking about an executive team.
Finally, I want to encourage and inspire executive teams to invest in a working model that uses dialogue and diversity as a resource. Build an executive team and leadership culture where the path to better success consists of utilizing the models and methods described above. Observations and results obtained from tens of thousands of organizations aren't wrong.
You also never need to be alone with these things. The world is full of good coaches who are happy to create success stories with you. Use them without hesitation 🙂
Jarkko Saari
Jarkko is a long-time coach in the field of relationship and interaction skills. He brings very practical means from the therapeutic world to enhance interaction and thereby business efficiency. Jarkko has an excellent ability to utilize people's differences through strengths and thus turn people's differences into a resource instead of a resource thief.
You can learn more about the topic by reading Patrick Lencioni's or Liisa Keltinkangas-Järvinen's literature.
Or as examples of analytics:
